Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

This week I didn't feel like writing about advertising or business or leadership or anything else an ambitious soul might find useful. So if you're in a vibrating hurry with far too much to do, right here would be the place to stop reading. The DELETE button is sitting there, twitching, anxious for you to bang it. There's nothing in today's note that would do a busy person like you any good.Unless, of course, you're in a major, world-class bigtime really extreme hurry. Then you should by all means keep reading.Would you like to have a secret retreat from the buzzing noise of daily life in the 21st century? Are you prepared to take a journey that will move your mind to another place, another time? Today I'm going to tell you about four non-fiction books and not one of them has a plot.But don't let that fool you.Sea Room, by Adam Nicolson.True to my custom, I opened this book to a random page (141) and began to read: ” …Something of the sense of holiness on islands comes, I think, from this strange, elastic geography. Islands are made larger, paradoxically, by the scale of the sea that surrounds them. The element which might reduce them, which might be thought to besiege them, has the opposite effect. The sea elevates these few acres into something they would never be if hidden in the mass of the mainland. The sea makes islands significant.” Impressed, I turned to chapter one where I was greeted, “For the last twenty years I have owned some islands. They are called the Shiants: one definite, softened syllable, 'the Shant Isles', like a sea shanty but with the 'y' trimmed away. The rest of the world thinks there is nothing much to them. Even on a map of the Hebrides the tip of your little finger would blot them out…” I bought hard-to-find copies for several of my friends.The Island at the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto.My partner Jeffrey Eisenberg shares my taste in books, so when I told him this book was “the epic story of Dutch Manhattan and the forgotten colony that shaped America,” he wasn't worried. Read it anyway. Later Jeff called me to say, “I think it may be one of the most interesting books I've ever read. Definitely the best-written history book. Almost reads like a novel.” But then again Jeff is strange. Might there be a chance that you, too, are Jeff's and my brand of crazy?Travels with Charley, by John Steinbeck.In 1961, a year prior to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, John Steinbeck bought a camper and set out with his dog, Charley, to see America through the windshield of a pickup truck. This book is the story of that 3-month journey. Most people associate Steinbeck with Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, or East of Eden. Worthy books, to be sure. But this, his odd collection of experiences and observations is, I think, my favorite Steinbeck of them all. Travels with Charley is a celebration of the Ordinary, the disjointed thoughts and notes of a highly accomplished man looking quietly at the world around him. It is perhaps the most underlined, dog-eared, footnoted book I own.In tribute to Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, we're going to publish – in a 380-page book – all the essays we received in response to the challenge I issued 5 weeks ago. This book will have an ISBN number and a barcode and will be registered with the Library of Congress – the works. It will be called People Stories: Inside the Outside, and a free copy of it will be the special “gift of initiation” I promised to send everyone who dared to join our bleary-eyed fraternity. When the book arrives from the printer, (hopefully by late April,) it will be released with considerable fanfare during a huge party at Wizard Academy's Tuscan Hall. Following the party, it will be made available for sale at major online booksellers. Details when we know them. Stay tuned.This Noble Land, by James Michener.On October 8, 1996, just a year before he died at the age of 90, this giant of literature chose to publish his highest thoughts and deepest fears about our nation. Steinbeck took us on a physical journey down roads of asphalt, but Michener takes us down paths of memory. You'll love it or hate it.I have no way of knowing which.Be well.Roy H. Williams

It's no secret that stronger ads generate faster growth. But with each higher level of awareness comes an increase in complaints:“I'm sick of hearing your ads.”TRANSLATION: “It makes me mad that I can't ignore you.”“Your ads don't sound professional. They're not polished and smooth.”TRANSLATION: “It makes me mad that your ads stand out.”“I'm offended by your ads and I'll never do business with you.”TRANSLATION: “Complaining is what I do to make me feel important.”Over the past two decades, my fastest-growing clients have always been the ones willing to run my ads exactly as I've written them. Clients who 'tweak' my ads to make them softer typically grow at a softer pace.If people complain about an ad, does that mean it isn't working?If people love an ad and compliment you on it, does that mean it's generating traffic and profits? “Yo Quiero Taco Bell.”Pepsico spent a couple hundred million dollars promoting that dog's endorsement and it didn't increase taco sales a dime. Seriously. But we all loved that little chihuahua, didn't we? If Pepsico's goal was to entertain America; mission accomplished. But if part of their plan was to increase the sale of tacos, well, that part didn't work out.You've got to decide once and for all how you're going to measure success. It doesn't matter what you consider to be success. It matters only that you have an objective way of measuring it, (and in the process, the effectiveness of your advertising.)Do you want people to say they love your ads? No problem, I can make that happen. Do you want to measure units sold and dollars collected? I can make the mercury rise on that thermometer, too. Just not on both.A professional ad writer is a person who has spent millions of dollars of other people's money to learn what doesn't work. Hang on to your hat: the worst ideas always make the most sense. Breakthrough ideas are always counter-intuitive.“If the big ad agencies are doing all the wrong things, is it because they're stupid?” I was asked that question last week by Karen Jonson, a magazine writer. My impulse was to answer fliply, “Yes,” but I choked it down, slowed my internal RPM, and listened to my heart. “No,” I told her, “the problem big agencies face is that they're never able to sit across the table from someone with unconditional authority to say 'absolutely yes.' When a creative person knows they must gain the approval of a group, he or she will instinctively play it safe and give the group what they want, rather than what they need.”Most ads aren't written to move anyone. They're written not to offend.The next time you're watching a really good TV show or listening to a funny comedian, ask yourself, “How much would this show be changed if a group of people were allowed to strip away everything in it that might offend?”No committee will ever approve a great ad, they'll castrate it. But in their minds they're merely “tweaking it, softening it, taking off the offensive edge.” Subject a talented ad writer to a lot of second-guessing and he or she will reward you with ads that all your friends and family are guaranteed to like.Congratulations. Now you've got ads that sound exactly like everyone else's.Roy H. Williams

The American DreamAmerica is a democracy and we believe in free enterprise.Let's look at that for a moment: Democracy is majority rule. Groupthink. “United we stand, divided we fall.” But the key to business – free enterprise – is to have an absolute dictator.In America's system of free enterprise, the person whose money is at risk is the person who gets to decide. Wrong or right, foolish or wise, whoever has the gold makes the rules. And that's the way it should be.So while America's social system is a democracy, individualized financial dictatorship is the foundation of our economy.Apply democratic principles to a business economy and what do you get? Socialism, if you do it softly. Do it for real and you've got Communism, the biggest economic disaster of the 20th century.Strange, isn't it? A democracy will have an economic system based on Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest, “It's a dog eat dog world and I'm about to wolf your poodle, pal.” But a society ruled by a dictator will usually have an economic system of financial democracy, “Everyone will work for the good of all and everyone will share alike.”Strange, isn't it? Social democracies have financial dictators and social dictators have financial democracies.The American Dream requires that businesses be controlled by two financial dictators. One of these dictators is the business owner. The other is the customer.Employees: If you don't like the rules of your dictator, you can go to work for someone else. Heck, you can even go to work for yourself. But if you're an unwise financial dictator, the bank and the IRS will come and haul away your stuff. Welcome to America.Customers: If you don't prefer the person you bought from yesterday, buy from someone else tomorrow. God Bless America: Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.I share these untidy and discomforting thoughts with you only as a warning: Don't introduce democratic principles into your business. I've seen it done too many times to count, and always by the kindest and best of my clients. And it has always ended badly.A strong business requires a strong dictator.Hey, don't get mad. I don't have a social or political agenda here, I'm just sharing an observation that's been tumbling through my head.“The American Dream” isn't the dream of a great society. It's the dream of personal wealth.I'm not saying that's the way it should be.Roy H. Williams

America has been flattered by advertising (“Because you deserve it”), misled by ads (“Lowest prices anywhere”), hyped by ads (“While supplies last”), and lied to repeatedly (“Guaranteed!”). The result of all this misinformation is a growing numbness to ad-speak. We're becoming deaf and blind to it. With effortless ease we shut it out of our minds.Why are advertisers happy when their ads sound like ads?Once-effective phrases become clichés when overused. Remember the 70s? Guys with long, pointed collars and blow-dried hair used the standard pick-up line, “Do you come here often?” They did it because it worked. They quit only when the ladies began laughing at them.But advertising still wears that ridiculous collar and blow-dried hair because its rejection was never face-to-face. We don't laugh at ads. We quietly ignore them.When demand is high and supply is low, your ads need only tell the world, “We've got it!” But how often do you actually get to do this?Advertising – when you're building a brand – is merely a relationship deepener. Its job is to cause the public to like you and trust you. Accomplish this and they'll remember you when they, or any of their circle, need what you sell.Good news: A seductive new voice in advertising is softening the hearts and winning the wallets of our nation at a record pace. This new future of advertising is known as “non ads” – consumer messages written in the vulnerable, candid style of a conversation between close friends. Their language isn't aggressive and egocentric like advertising, but unguarded, playful and real. Non-ads admit weaknesses, confess fears, and never try to impress. They speak to the customer in the language of a friend, rather than a pitchman. Does it surprise you that the natural response of the customer is to give you their trust? But here's the bigger question: Do you have the courage to be a friend, tell the truth, and worry more about your customer's happiness than your own?My strong suggestion is that you adopt it sooner rather than later. The following examples of two real non-ads I've encountered lately should help you better understand this new concept and begin implementing it today.Example #1You're seated in 12-B, reading an in-flight magazine. The following words appear in white letters against a medium olive background, no photograph or graphic:Isn't it amazing how people will read anything at 36,000 ft? You, for instance, are reading this. And even though it's quite obviously an ad, and you're skeptical of advertising, you'll continue reading it. See, here you are, still reading. C'mon, don't try to deny it. And why are you still reading? Not because you find it particularly captivating, but because it's here. And you're here. And you've already exhausted your mandatory, meaningless airplane chit-chat time with your neighbor. So right about now you're probably asking yourself, 'Why am I still reading this?' Perhaps you're even pretending you're not reading it anymore. You're going to close this magazine up right now and slip it back into that pocket up there. But wait, you're still reading it, aren't you? You can't help yourself. It's here. You're here. And you still can't use your cell phone until you reach the tarmac. By the way, we know a really good bookstore around here.At the bottom of the page is the logo for Verizon and in larger letters, “Superpages.com, We know around here.”Like you and trust you. That's the goal.Example #2Walk into the men's room at Robbins Bros., The World's Biggest Engagement Ring Store, and here's what you'll see covering the wall of the toilet stall:Here's your chance. Get out now while you can. Quick, look for a window. Or the ventilation shaft. Okay, remove your clothes. Skivvies, too. Lube your entire body with that hand soap over there. Now take a penny and unscrew the corner of the duct. Now get to struggling. Conviction is important at this point. You do not want to get stuck. Imagine your bride-to-be coming in and seeing your nude lower torso poking out like some sort of modern art installation. That's an image for the mantel, isn't it? So squirm like the wind. Once free, secure some clothing and start a new life somewhere with complicated extradition laws. And then back to bachelorhood. Yes, the singularly most forlorn, emotionally vacant time of your life. Come on, is there anything more overrated than bachelorhood? If you're like most bachelors, you go to bed every night wishing you weren't one. Let's look at the sacred, time-tested bachelor traditions you'll be missing out on. Well, of course, there's being a slob. As well as extended periods of not bathing and otherwise lapsed personal hygiene. And hanging out with your unattached friends. A group of guys who with each passing year are starting to get, frankly, a little creepy. Your future is out there. Your best friend is out there. Besides, that liquid soap itches like crazy.Vision and audacity allowed these comp

It takes 1,800 electrons to equal the mass of a single proton.Protons and their cousins – neutrons – make up 99.95 percent of the mass in the universe. Yet it's the electrical charges of the seemingly insignificant 0.05 percent – those tiny orbiting electrons – that hold our universe together.Commitment. Purpose. Focus. Passion. These are the electrons of Happiness. Orbiting our actions. Binding us together. Keeping us from flying apart.Shift gears, new subject: Is commitment a manifestation of passion, or the cause of it? In other words, are we committed because we have a purpose? Or do we have a purpose because we chose to commit? (Please don't make me tell you the answer. I'm begging you to see it for yourself…)Ah. You see it now. I'm relieved.I'm alarmed at the number of people who act as though purpose is somehow inherent, tied to destiny, a thing mysteriously willed to a chosen few by the gods. They moan, “I don't have a purpose. I don't have a passion. I'm not happy.”Frankly, it's all I can do to keep from slapping them.Let me say this plainly: Your life's purpose will be chosen by you. It's a decision you will make. If you're waiting for your purpose to drop mysteriously from the sky, you're wasting what could have been a wonderful life.Passion comes from having a focus.Focus comes from having a purpose.Purpose comes from having made a commitment.To whom or what will you choose to commit?Shift again, third subject: The world stands knee-deep in unrewarded talent because most people are unable to survive the death of their dream.Every dream of the future is a seed. But until your dream falls into the ground and dies, it cannot burst from the ground and deliver the harvest you seek.Is your commitment strong enough to survive the death of your dream? Will you be found still hanging on when hope has fled, the room is dark and everyone believes you a fool?Believe it or not, this is usually the key to the miracles that follow.Roy H. Williams

It hit me. “I've become an eavesdropper, listening to the conversations of strangers.”It's 5:00AM and I'm sitting at the bar of an all-night café on the wrong side of town eating a three-dollar breakfast, listening to the smelly, funny stories of downtrodden people who know each other well. Their sparkling banter gives me a glimpse into problems I'll never touch, victories I'll never celebrate, a life I'll never have. These are they who will never have internet access, a credit card or cable TV.But they seem happy.I've come here to learn what it means to be an outsider in America.People tell me they want to write. I respond, “You can't find a pencil?” In truth, few want to write. Most want only to have written. People tell me they want to travel, have adventures, meet interesting people and learn about different cultures. They want to expand their world. I'm betting you can guess my answer to that one… “If you will expand your world, you must crawl on your hands and knees, get on your belly and squirm under the fence that surrounds your insulated life.”For most people, travel means being pampered by accommodating servants in exotic places. But interesting people, strange cultures and high adventure don't await you on the other side of the world. They await you on the other side of town.Are you willing to get on your belly and crawl under that fence? Will you invest an hour to enlarge your world? If you will actually do it, not just think about it, but really do it, and write to me about it, I will send you a special gift of initiation. These are the rules:1. You must arrive and be seated in a 24-hour eating establishment between 1:30AM and 5:30AM in a part of town where you rarely go. Or perhaps a truckstop beyond town's edge. The further outside your comfort zone, the better.2. If a man, you must go alone. If a woman and concerned for your safety, you can take one other person with you. But make sure your friend understands the goal isn't to chat with each other, but to glimpse a whole other world that exists side-by-side with the one you know.3. While you're eating and listening and absorbing this strange new reality, think of what these people need most and how you might help them get it. While you're at it, you might also think a little about what they have that you don't. There is a rich sense of community among the outcast.4. Write the details of your excursion within 24 hours of your meal and email them to [email protected] Be sure to provide a mailing address where we can send your special Gift of Initiation. I don't yet know what it will be.Want to hear something that will shock you? I'm fairly confident that fewer than 12 readers from among my 31,000 subscribers will actually do what I've just described, and more than half of these will be Canadian. We Americans are unlikely to discomfort ourselves except for purposes of recreation.How accurate are my predictions? A few weeks ago when I offered to send readers a free copy of my favorite book, I accurately predicted for the shipping department – within seven – the precise number of people who would respond to that offer. (Yes, that number was deep into the hundreds.)Will you join this strange new fraternity? Your gift of initiation awaits.Roy H. Williams

The bottom-rung loser in one town can move to another town and often become the king of his category. All it takes is weak competitors. I've seen it happen a dozen times.Whether you dominate your marketplace won't be determined solely by the strength of your advertising. It will be determined partly by the strength of your competitors.How good are you at what you do? How good are they?There are 4 factors that determine business success. The most important of these, competitive environment, is the factor most often ignored. The reason, I suppose, is that business owners feel they can do nothing about it. So they ignore their competitors.But their customers don't.The ability to measure your strength objectively and compare it to the strength of your competitors is essential to strategic planning.This is why Wizard Academy is developing a six-sigma Customer Experience Index, a patented instrument that will allow you to know – precisely and objectively– how you compare to each of your competitors locally. The same instrument will also compare your scores to national averages for your category in a number of critical customer touch-points. Sound interesting? Stay tuned. A Beta version of the instrument will be released in Summer '06.Today we'll take a brief look at the four factors that govern business success. (In weeks to come we'll zoom in for a closer examination of each.) In order of importance they are:1. Competitive Environment (strength of competitors)2. Business Model (strategy. creation of customer expectations.)3. Operational Execution (delivery of what was promised to the customer.)4. Message Development (total business communication, including ad writing, décor, media planning, etc.)When released, the Customer Experience Index will objectively measure what had previously been unmeasurable.And you're the first to know.Roy H. Williams

I was in the shower when my cell phone started ringing. Pennie answered it for me. It was my partner Jeff Eisenberg.Dripping, I took the phone. “Yo. Jefferson.”“I'm sending you an article from The Economist. It's something I've heard you talk about a hundred times.”“What is it?”“You know who Peter Drucker is?”“Management guy.”“Yeah. The story tells how his bestselling book, the one containing the most detailed, step-by-step instructions, is the one nobody reads anymore. The Drucker books they're studying in all the big colleges today are the ones that were poorly received at first and didn't sell very well. You talked to me about this sort of thing on the day we met.”“I remember. 'The loneliest people are the ones ahead of their time.'”Ludwig von Beethoven knew this outsider phenomenon well. Many of the musical compositions we consider to be his greatest today were panned by the critics of his time. Even his own musicians were confused by them. When the famed violinist Radicati asked Beethoven about these pieces he replied, “Oh, those are not for you, but for a later age.”We are that later age.Thankfully, Ludwig von Beethoven didn't let the dullness of the public palate affect what he chose to create. In other words, Ludy didn't pander to the finger-snapping jingle crowd.In my mind, I ask Ludwig why he doesn't try to write the kind of music that sells. I see him there. He looks quietly at me for a moment, then curls a lip, looks at the ground and spits. Then he looks back up at me. After a moment's hesitation I nod.But I'm not the only one nodding.“When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” – Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels“Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” – Albert Einstein“Funeral by funeral, science makes progress.” – Paul Samuelson. Yes, even scientists who are ahead of their time are rejected by their peers.The magnificent Emily Dickinson wrote with complete confidence that her words would never be read. It was only when her family looked in her bureau drawer on the day she died that they found 1,700 poems that would quickly be ranked among the greatest ever written.Emily Dickinson knew a freedom not felt by other writers. And it made her words soar. Feel them cut like shimmering blades:FAME is a fickle foodUpon a shifting plate,Whose table once a Guest, but notThe second time, is set.Whose crumbs the crows inspect,And with ironic cawFlap past it to the Farmer's corn;Men eat of it and die.Emily Dickinson was like Beethoven in that she had no need for public praise. She wrote for herself, an audience of one. Study the lives of the Great Ones and you'll find this to be a common characteristic among them.Cyril Connolly said it best: “Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”I believe Peter Drucker, Jonathan Swift and Albert Einstein would agree.Ludy Von would, too.Emily says she's in.How about you? Do you have something new and different to say?Are you willing to write for an audience of one?Roy H. Williams

Great ads can be either product-specific or store-specific. Bad ads are generally category-specific. And then there are franchise ads.Franchise ads build the master brand. The hope of every franchisee is that the ads provided by the franchisor will generate enough brand magnetism to pull customers into their store. Due to the fact that a franchisor can afford to create a higher quality ad campaign than the typical local merchant, this strategy often succeeds.Category-specific ads are written broadly enough to fit every advertiser in a category. A transparent fabric of smoothly woven clichés, a category-specific ad is a generalized template into which one merely inserts a store name and address. “All you have to do is fill in the blanks.” But remember: Ads that fit everyone don't work very well for anyone. These were once called institutional ads. I do not recommend them.Product-specific ads benefit every retailer who sells the product, but they aren't really about the retailer at all. They're about the product. This is why the independent retailer should question whether or not to take the manufacturer's fifty cents to run their product-specific ads. Are they really paying for half of your advertising, or are you paying for half of theirs? Only when the co-op requirements are extremely flexible do I recommend that independent retailers accept the so-called “free money” offered by manufacturers. If you're paying half the cost, be sure at least half the message is about you.Store-specific ads are the foundation of local branding, but to write them requires intimate, detailed research on the part of an expert ad writer. Rarely will a good, store-specific ad fit another advertiser in the same category. The story I'm about to tell you is true. I've changed only the name of the store, the town, and the vegetable:Heisenberg's Jewelers had been in the same building on Main Street in Cabbage Valley for 105 years. A facelift 7 years earlier had given the store white carpet, walnut paneling and a huge chandelier in a high, domed ceiling. Heisenberg's was the Sistine Chapel of jewelry stores. Not a problem, except that Cabbage Valley is the turnip capital of the world, a little farming community of about 45,000 people. Even the wealthiest of Cabbage Valley's farmers felt they weren't dressed well enough to enter that store. Heisenberg's was truly an intimidating place.“You need to understand who our customer is,” my client told me as soon as I arrived. “Our customer is a 40 year-old woman with money. Upscale. Very upscale. Well dressed. Always buys the best. That's our customer. That's who you need to target.” This was in mid-October. I had been hired by Heisenberg's to help save Christmas because if they had another season as bad as the previous six, they were going to have to close their doors in January.“Let's get something straight,” I told them. “There's no handle I can crank that will spit out 40 year-old rich women. I'm going to have to write ads that appeal to men or you're going to have to find another way to make a living.” It's statements like those that separate consultants from salesmen.This is the radio ad that saved Heisenberg's:“Ladies, many of you will be fortunate enough this Christmas to find a small, but beautifully wrapped package under your tree bearing a simple gold seal that says 'Heisenberg's.' Now you and I both know there's jewelry in the box. But the man who put it there for you is trying desperately to tell you that you are more precious than diamonds, more valuable than gold, and very, very special. You see, he could have gone to a department store and bought department store jewelry, or picked up something at the mall like all the other husbands. But the men who come to Heisenberg's aren't trying to get off cheap or easy. Men who come to Heisenberg's believe their wives deserve the best. And whether they spend 99 dollars or 99 hundred, the message is the same: Men who come to Heisenberg's are still very much in love… We just thought you should know.”That ad was delivered slowly and thoughtfully with style and grace. No hurry. No street address. No store hours. No phone number. We simply told listeners what they already knew about Heisenberg's but made them feel differently about it. What we said in essence was, “If your husband voluntarily came to this scarily expensive store, he must really be in love with you.” It worked like magic.Throughout the month of December, men wedged themselves into Heisenberg's, waved stacks of cash at the register and shouted, “I don't care what you put in the box, but make sure it's got that damn gold sticker.” Heisenberg's made a blistering fortune that year and reversed their downward trend.Thirteen months later I got a phone call from a jeweler in Connecticut. “You the man they call the Wizard of Ads?”“Who is this?” I asked.“I ran one of them 'wizard' radio ads that's supposed to work. Had the worst Christmas I ever had. Didn

People tell me they want to learn to think outside the box.No problemo. The secret is to stay out of the box to begin with.You crawl into the box when you think about your problem and wrap its known obstacles around you. So quit. Focus instead on an interesting saying, quote, or phrase unrelated to your problem. Crawl inside that bit of wisdom and look at your problem from this cozy new perspective. Don't be surprised if your chosen phrase works like Ali Baba's “Open Sesame,” and throws open the door to innovation, wealth, and recognition.The secret to conjuring powerful strategy – also known as coming up with The Big Idea – is to free your beagle. Abandon the linear, sequential logic of your brain's left hemisphere and engage the pattern recognition of the right.Last week I wrote to you about commitment, persistence. I had a reason.“Just as a dog guards a bone safely between its paws when not actively chewing it, creative people nurture an idea even when not actively thinking about it… Creativity does not result from mysterious visions that come in dreams, or from fortuitous circumstances. Creativity and persistence are synonymous. Constantly thinking about the problem, consciously and unconsciously, maximizes the possibility that a chance occurrence is likely to be useful in solving it.” – Dr. Richard Cytowic, neurologistPick a problem that's had you handcuffed. Now let's create a “chance occurrence” like the one mentioned by Cytowic. We're going to let your beagle sniff a trail from it to your new solution:1. Go to the home page of Wizard Academy and see, in the center of that page, the random quote that was generated for you from my personal collection of nigh a thousand.2. Ponder how the core idea of that quote relates to the problem you've been trying to solve. Find a link. Use the quote as a new point of origin. Let it pull you outside the box.3. Write down the solution triggered by the quote, no matter how ridiculous.4. Click the quote generator to launch a new quote and do it all over again. “Everything in the universe is connected, of course. It's a matter of using imagination to discover the links, and language to expand and enliven them.” – Tom RobbinsIf you were able to successfully unleash the beagle in your brain, you should have 3 new “outside the box” solutions in under 4 minutes. Continue to generate random quotes and apply them to your problem until one of them makes you laugh. Then walk away from your computer and go do something with your hands. Carry out the trash. Hang those mini-blinds you bought but never installed. Vacuum the car.Don't be surprised when your beagle reappears with a juicy rabbit of an idea. One that will really work.Happy Holidays.Roy H. Williams

Determination is emotional, a moment of intense focus with clenched jaw and the visualization of a mission accomplished.The sneer is gone from Casey's lip, his teeth are clenched in hate,He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate;And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow.Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,But there is no joy in Mudville – mighty Casey has struck out.I've known men like Casey, haven't you? All hat, no cattle? Big bravado, little substance? An alligator mouth with a baboon butt?I'm sorry, but “merely determined” people seem shallow to me. Like Casey at the Bat, they get themselves all worked up, then just as quickly get unworked and wander off to do something else. Determination is transient.But commitment is irrevocable, a decision that never looks back.Ask someone you admire how they accomplished what they did, and they'll likely tell you a story of despair and the strong temptation to chuck it all, throw in the towel and quit. But they didn't. They hung on a little longer. And then one more day. And another…Big things happen for the truly committed on the far side of the breaking point, long after the merely determined have quit and gone home. Does this sound unreasonable to you? Consider the words of George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.”George Bernard Shaw understood commitment.So did Margaret Mead. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, that is the only thing that ever has.”Commitment steps up to pay the price when mere Determination runs for cover.I speak of marriage, faith, and business.In chapter 19 of the first book of Kings, Elijah, in a dark mood, runs to a cave in the wilderness and pours out his complaints to God, who instructs him to go and find Elisha, son of Shaphat, plowing with twelve yoke of oxen. Elijah found him and draped his cloak around Elisha's shoulders. Recognizing that he'd been chosen to finish the job begun by Elijah, Elisha immediately slaughtered his oxen and cooked their meat over the fires of his plowing equipment. Elisha gave the meat to his co-workers and family, then set out to follow Elijah and become his attendant.Elisha, a farmer, killed his oxen and burned his plow, leaving himself nothing to fall back on.That, my friend, is commitment.Is there anything to which you are truly and deeply committed? Is there anything for which you would kill your ox and burn your plow?On the day you can answer yes, you will have learned what it means to be genuinely happy.Roy H. Williams

Businesses don't fail due to reaching the wrong people.Businesses fail when they say the wrong things.And they say the wrong things when they believe what the public tells them.Conduct a survey. Ask the public to describe in detail the kind of place they'd like to shop. Then build that place, exactly as described, and see if they ever show up.Experience tells us they won't.We'll use furniture stores as an example. People say they want a store where they can look at all the different styles of furniture, see all the different patterns and colors of fabric and grains of wood and colors of wood stain, and then have their own 'dream furniture' made according to their choices. Today you'll find that furniture store on every corner. “And we'll even show you on a computer monitor exactly what your new sofa will look like! Want to see it in another fabric? Click this button. Another color of wood? Click this button. And we'll deliver it to your home, direct from the factory! You'll be buying factory direct!” But that's not how the big boys do it.His real name is Jim McIngvale. They call him Mattress Mac. Twenty-five years ago he dove headlong into the furniture business with just five thousand dollars. It's all he had. This year that furniture store will do nearly 200 million dollars in a single location, placing it among the most successful stores in the world.Jim occasionally buys a day of my time to pick my brain and bounce ideas off me. I should be paying him.During our last visit, I asked my friend if I could share the secret of his success with you. Graciously, he allowed it: As simple as this may sound, Jim's 200 million dollar secret is immediate delivery. When people buy new furniture, they want to see it in their home immediately. “Buy it today and we'll deliver it tonight,” is Jim's angle. He doesn't do special orders. “If you see it, we've got it.” Remember all those people who said they wanted to pick from a large selection of fabrics and wood grains? Tell them you'll deliver their new sofa in 8 to 12 weeks. Then Jim will show them something entirely different but offer to deliver it immediately. Guess who usually wins?What people say they would do is rarely what they will actually do. This is what makes it foolish to put too much faith in surveys. We don't know ourselves as well as we think.Ask any real estate agent. The homes people buy are never the ones they described to the agent when they got in the car. Not even close.Now let's talk about you. Chances are, you've been reaching the right people all along. You've just been saying the wrong things. Some ads are like waving raw meat in front of hungry dogs. Most ads are lectures, explaining to these same dogs all the joys of organic popcorn.Do you have a tasty message to deliver to the world? Or are you expecting your ad writers to apply a thick layer of creativity to hide the fact that you have nothing to say?Truthfully, what percentage of your ads say anything worth hearing?Sholem Asch was right when he said, “Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.” But Morris Hite said it brazenly, “If you have a good selling idea, your secretary can write your ad for you.”We're here if you need us.Roy H. Williams

Finances. Relationships. Health… the tall monsters we face in life's dark ocean when we awaken underwater, alone in the night, not knowing what to do.Ever been there?People respond to deep crisis in different ways. There are:1. Handwringers who talk about the problem to anyone who will listen. “You just won't believe what I'm going through.”2. Dark worriers who internalize the problem, then grow despondent and depressed. “Life sucks and then you die.”3. Positive thinkers who prop themselves up with platitudes: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” “God helps those who help themselves.” “It's not the size of dog in the fight that counts, it's the size of fight in the dog,” etc.4. Analytical planners who gather the data, calculate the odds, do whatever makes the most sense, then resign themselves to the eventual outcome. “I've done all that I can do.”5. People who abandon steps 1 through 4 and run to God like little girls. “Daddy! Daddy! Save me!”Does it surprise you that I've always been part of the run-to-God crowd?I'm not trying to be religious here. I'm trying to be helpful.Many of you will find today's memo completely irrelevant. I realize that. But with 31,000 readers, I've got to believe that at least a few hundred feel they are suffocating in darkness. (If you're in the sunshine-and-song, problem-free majority, you're free to quit reading right now if you like:)It seems to me that we're reluctant to run to God for different reasons:1. Doubt. “God doesn't exist and I'll not demean myself by caving in to that Myth after a lifetime of self-sufficiency.”2. Pride. “I ought to be able to handle this on my own.”3. Religiosity. “God is sovereign. If I suffer, it is because He has willed it.”4. Shame. “I haven't earned the right to ask God for anything.”Doubt has never been a problem for me. Maybe someday I'll tell you why.Pride is one of my less endearing traits. Frankly, I'm as territorial an alpha-male as any redneck bastard that ever drank Budweiser. But I have no pride when I ponder God. I'm arrogant. But I'm not stupid.Religiosity. I agree with Arthur C. Clarke, who said, “You can't have it both ways. You can't have both free will and a benevolent higher power who protects you from yourself.” In other words, I believe a once-sovereign God gave up absolute control of our circumstances on the day he gave us free will and put us in charge of this world. “Religiosity” is also what Tom, a friend of Anne Lamott, was talking about when he said, “You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”Shame. Like you, I've never earned the right to run to God like a little girl crying “Daddy, Daddy, Save me.” Certainly not. Instead, I take the position, “Jesus, let's not make this about how good I am. Let's make this about how good you are.”Call me crazy. Call me delusional. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I believe in a God who likes me and is on my side. And I am no stranger to miracles.Do you need a miracle? Like it or not, I've given you what has always worked for me. It's the very best advice I've got: “God, let's not make this about how good I am. Let's make it about how good you are.”Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday.Are there things for which you are thankful?Roy H. Williams

I did a bad, bad thing.Last week's memo ended too abruptly. “Yes, selling to men can be very easy. But how does one sell to women? Ah. That is a different question. – Roy H. Williams” The phrase, “sell to women?” was hyperlinked to additional information. Judging from the record number who clicked that link, What Women Really Want remains one of the great, unsolved mysteries of man.The hyperlinked phrase, of course, took you to the course description for Michele Miller's class on marketing to women. Those who clicked her free, streaming video found the answer. But for rest of you, my cliffhanging question remains unanswered.Allow me to rectify.Women want connectedness.John Donne wrote in 1624, “No man is an island.” But I disagree. Men are very often islands – voluntarily solitary. But I would agree that no woman is an island. Women are the connected ones, the glue, the binding agents in every family, whether a family by genetics or a family by choice. Women are the bringers of Together.“Men use language to establish status. Their measurements are up and down. 'What do you think of me now that I've said this? Am I up or down? Up or down?' But women use language to establish bonds of connection, near and far. 'How close are we now that I've said this?'” – Dr. Nick Grant, adjunct faculty, Wizard Academy“What a woman wants is someone who will listen to her.” – Donna Pinciotti, on That 70's Show, explaining why a beautiful girl canceled her date with Kelso to go out with Fez instead.In the world of women, what is romance but a thousand points of connectedness? Listen, men, and learn.My mother taught me all this when I was thirteen. She probably didn't think I was listening at the time, but it was one of those moments when that strange camera in my brain went “click.” “What a woman wants,” she told me, “is to know in her heart that someone considers her the most important thing in the world.”Study aberrant human behavior and you'll find that mass murderers are always men. Crazy women don't kill strangers. They have no connectedness with strangers. Crazy women kill their children.The cognoscenti will recall my comments on brain lateralization: “In Myers-Briggs terminology, the left-brain preferences are E,S,T, and J. The right-brain preferences are I, N, F, and P.” The left-brain is considered to be the masculine hemisphere; deductive reasoning, up or down. The right-brain is the feminine, intuitive hemisphere; pattern recognition, points of connectedness.Aha.Roy H. Williams

“The whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned into woman from the start.” – Carl Jung, Two Essays in Analytical Psychology“What can a man say about woman, his own opposite? Woman always stands just where the man’s shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two. Then, when he tries to repair this misunderstanding, he overvalues her and believes her the most desirable thing in the world.” – Carl Jung, Women In Europe“I think the idealization of women is indigenous to men. There are various ways of idealizing women, especially sexually, based in almost every case on their inaccessibility. When a woman functions as an unobtainable love object, she takes on a mythical quality. You can see this principle functioning as a sales device in advertising and in places like Playboy magazine. Almost every movie you see has this quality, because you can’t embrace the image on the screen. Thousands of novels use this principle, because you can’t embrace a printed image on a page.” – James Dickey, Self Interviews, p. 153In New York Harbor stands a lady. And a stone woman holds the scales in front of every courthouse in the land. And we conjure these twins by name with every dying breath of our Pledge of Allegiance, “…with Liberty and Justice for all.”Airplanes, ships, cars and guitars are given feminine names. If a thing is beautiful and important and precious to us, we always see it as a woman.When a man buys a diamond, he’s paying for the reaction of the woman he loves. He’s paying for that look on her face. He doesn’t care about the properties of the diamond itself; color, cut, clarity and carat weight. He cares only about the woman. In your ads, don’t make him imagine the sparkle of the diamond. Make him see the sparkle of the woman.Yes, selling to men can be very easy.But how does one sell to women?Ah. That is a different question.Roy H. Williams

The price of making a powerful statement is cheap compared to the cost of ads that don't work. So make a statement that counts. This is the best advice I can give you.I'm not talking about making a grand and sweeping claim, such as, “Lowest prices anywhere. We won't be undersold.” No one believes hype anymore. I'm talking about a statement that is bona fide, no loopholes, easy to experience. And it only takes one such statement to put a business over the top. This is why you should designate a percentage of your ad budget to purchase word-of-mouth advertising.Word-of-mouth is credible because a person puts their reputation on the line every time they make a recommendation. And that person has nothing to gain but the appreciation of those who are listening. What are you doing to make sure your potential ambassadors feel secure? What are you doing to trigger word-of-mouth?1. Word-of-mouth is triggered when a customer experiences something far beyond what was expected. Slightly exceeding their expectations just won't do it.2. Don't depend on your staff to trigger word-of-mouth by delivering “exceptional customer service.” Good service is expected. It's bad service we talk about. Great service can increase customer retention and generate lots of positive feedback to the business owner, but rarely is it the basis for word-of-mouth advertising.3. Physical, nonverbal statements are the most dependable in triggering word-of-mouth. These statements can be architectural, kinetic, or generous, but they must go far beyond the boundaries of what is normal.4. BUDGET to DELIVER the experience that will trigger word-of-mouth. Sometimes your word-of-mouth budget will be incremental, so that its cost is tied to your customer count. Other times it will require a capital investment, so that repayment will have to be withheld from your advertising budget over a period of years. The greatest danger isn't in overspending, but in under spending. Under spending for a word-of-mouth trigger is like buying a ticket halfway to Europe.5. Don't promise it in your ads. Although it's tempting to promise the thing you're counting on to trigger word-of-mouth, these promises will only eliminate the possibility of your customer becoming your ambassador. Why would a customer repeat what you say about yourself in your ads? You must allow your customer to deliver the good news. Don't rob your ambassador of their moment in the sun.Your word-of-mouth trigger can be architectural, kinetic, or generous.1. Architectural: This can be product design, store design, fantasy décor, etc. The piano store that looks like a huge piano, with black and white keys forming the long awning over the long front porch. The erupting volcano outside the Mirage in Las Vegas. A glass-bottom floor that allows customers to see what's happening far below them. Do you remember when McDonalds began building playgrounds attached to all their restaurants? It worked like magic for 20 years.2. Kinetic: Activity. Motion. “Performance” by every definition of the word. The tossing of fresh fish from one employee to another at Pike Place Market in Seattle, (the inspiration for FISH!, that bestselling book and training film.) The magical, twirling knives of the tableside chefs at Benihana. Kissing the codfish when you get “screeched in” at any pub in Newfoundland. (A screech-in is a loud and funny ceremony where non-Newfoundlanders down a shot of cheap rum, repeat some phrases in the local dialect, and kiss a codfish. Everyone who visits that wonderful island returns home with a story of being “screeched in.”) While it may at first seem like a staff-driven, kinetic word-of-mouth trigger is a violation of number 2 above, “Don't depend on your staff,” it's really not. A staff-driven kinetic word-of-mouth trigger is constantly observable by management. It isn't a “customer service” experience delivered privately, one on one. Extraordinary product performance is another kind of kinetic trigger. If a laundry detergent dramatically outperformed all others, its performance would likely become a kinetic word-of-mouth trigger. But remember, slightly exceeding customer expectations is usually not enough.3. Generous: Extremely large portions in a diner. Oversized seats on an airplane. Are you willing to become known as the restaurant that allows its guests to select – at no charge – their choice of desserts from an expensive dessert menu? You can easily cover the hard cost of it in the prices of your entrees and drinks. Flour, butter and sugar are cheap advertising. Are you the jewelry store that's willing to become known for replacing watch batteries at no charge, even when the customer hasn't purchased anything and didn't buy the watch from your store? Word will spread. And batteries cost less than advertising. Why sell them for a few lousy dollars when they're worth so much more as a word-of-mouth trigger?Architectural, kine

We're building a school of the communication arts. Do you want to come along?Oh, the questions we'll answer together! The interesting things we'll find! We've built a chapel where we can think big thoughts. And a grand auditorium where we can exchange ideas. The things we'll talk about!We need only a place to lay our heads when day is over and twilight darkens and campfires dim and talk is done. Will you help us build this place?The Mainstream Many saw only rickety old windmills and a delusional old man. But Don Quixote saw defiant giants that had to be defeated for the good of the world.“What giants?” said Sancho Panza.“Those you see there,” answered his master, “with the long arms, and some have them nearly two leagues long.”“Look, your worship,'' said Sancho. “What we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the vanes that turn by the wind and make the millstone go.”“It is easy to see,” replied Don Quixote, “that you are not used to this business of adventures.”– Don Quixote, 1605, by Miguel de CervantesI can relate to Don Quixote, can't you? Like him, I often feel that no one else sees the ugly giants that loom so large on my horizon. And like Quixote, I'm often told I'm delusional and irrelevant.But the giants I see are real.The Mainstream Many believe that all is well, education isn't broken, journalism hasn't lost its way, music and literature and art were never really important, and traditional advertising is working just fine. “All is well,” the many tell us. But when you look again with the eyes of your heart, you'll see a nation growing dumber, journalism becoming propaganda, art fading into yesterday, and advertising working less and less well.There are currently 30,299 readers of these Monday Morning Memos who see the same giants I see. And together we're building Wizard Academy, a school of the communication arts. Our goal is to enhance the world's ability to communicate. I'm not talking about inventing new devices to help us reach each other. We already have those. I'm talking about knowing better what to say through this vast megaphone of technology. And how to say it better.The citizens of the world have been handed cell phones and DVRs, satellite phones and Skype, websites and blogs, email attachments and streaming video and podcasting and Boomerang. We are children with loaded guns. Do you remember when terrorists beheaded an American and streamed his murder onto the internet? Millions of curious voyeurs witnessed it on their computer monitors. How many of those do you suppose were 8 year-olds who will forever carry the itching scab of that wound in their minds? No, don't tell me it was the same as in video games. Even 8 year-olds know that video games aren't real.He was wearing an orange jump suit.Can new messages be created to counteract that message? I believe they can. The next 3-day Magical Worlds Communications Workshop is scheduled for Dec. 6-8 at the new, 33-acre campus of Wizard Academy. You really should come and spend time with us.Maybe we're crazy, tilting at windmills. Maybe we're defeating giants. You decide.Roy H. Williams

How many months has it been since you went looking for information in the yellow pages? How many minutes has it been since you asked your favorite search engine?I think you just answered the question about whether or not your local business needs a website.Without a doubt, websites are the most overlooked vehicle of advertising for small, owner-operated businesses. Every retailer needs one. Every dentist, lawyer, accountant and minister needs one. Every café, restaurant, coffee shop and nightclub needs one. Every wholesale supply company needs one.I'm not suggesting that all these need to accept online orders and actually transact business online. I'm just saying that everyone listed in yesterday's yellow pages needs to be available on today's internet. It's where your customers expect to find you.Properly constructed, a website allows your prospects to gather information from the privacy of their computer monitors. What are the questions you answer every day? And what, exactly, do you say to customers when you're speaking to them face-to-face? This is exactly the information that needs to be available on your website.Think of your website as a relationship deepener, a half-step between your advertising and your front door.Do you suppose it's easier:(1.) to convince customers to visit your website, or(2.) to convince them to get in their car, drive to your store, park that car and walk in your door?Additionally, internet is heaven-on-earth for the 49 percent of our population that's introverted.Introverts prefer to gather information anonymously, unlikely to dial your telephone number except as a last resort. Even more unlikely is that they'll choose to walk into your store and engage a chatty salesperson. But don't think introverts are shy. They simply like to gather the facts before putting themselves into a position where they're likely to be asked to answer questions. Forty-nine percent of your customers prefer to know what they're coming to buy before they walk in your door. And even the extraverted, chatty 51 percent will appreciate an informative website that functions as an expert salesperson during the hours you're not open for business.Don't think for a moment that your customers aren't already online.Every time a client tells me their customers are too old, too monied, or too traditional to be online, I immediately gather a crowd of them and ask, “How many of you have used a search engine in the past 7 days to research a product or service you were considering?” I raise my own hand.The hands raised in echo are never less than 85 percent of the crowd.Launch a website. Make it interesting. And watch your in-store sales begin to climb.Roy H. Williams

Mabel is a widow deep in poverty with two hungry children of her own. Washing other people’s laundry ten hours a day, Mabel earns barely enough money to keep them fed. To keep a roof over their heads, she works for a real estate man who moves her and the children from shack to shack “to clean them up and make them salable.” But poor though she is, Mabel can’t watch a baby go unloved, so she makes room in her home and her heart for Jimmy, an abandoned baby that was left on her doorstep.Throughout his childhood, Jimmy will wear old, second-hand clothes because that’s the best Mabel can do. His shoelaces will be broken and knotted. He’ll never own a pair of skates, a bicycle, a baseball glove or a toy of any kind. But when his little town opens a public library, he and a girl named Margaret will be the first in line to receive library cards. One day, as the pair are searching for books they’ve not yet read, the librarian says, “Goodness, Margaret and Jimmy, I believe you’ve read all the children’s books we have! If you wish, you can start on the other shelves.”Margaret Mead will grow up to author 20 books and serve as president of a number of important scientific associations, including the American Anthropological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She will receive 28 honorary doctorate degrees from America’s leading universities and in 1978, be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom.As an adolescent, Jimmy hitchhikes his way from Pennsylvania to Florida and back again with only 35 cents in his pocket. By the time he graduates from high school, he will have visited all but 3 of the 48 contiguous states. In the Navy, Jim rises to the rank of lieutenant commander, serving on some 49 different islands in the South Pacific during World War II. Each night, he writes his thoughts and impressions in a journal.“Sitting there in the darkness, illuminated only by the flickering lamplight, I visualized the aviation scenes in which I had participated, the landing beaches I’d seen, the remote outposts, the exquisite islands with bending palms, and especially the valiant people I’d known: the French planters, the Australian coast watchers, the Navy nurses, the Tonkinese laborers, the ordinary sailors and soldiers who were doing the work, and the primitive natives to whose jungle fastnesses I had traveled.”The book that will emerge from Jim’s journal will be published as Tales of the South Pacific and win the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. And by the time he’s done, James Michener will have written more than 40 books that will collectively sell more than 100 million copies. He will be granted more than 30 honorary doctorates in 5 fields and receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. His cash donations to public libraries and universities will exceed 117 million dollars.It seems a child can learn a lot by just reading.Roy H. Williams

No one wants to be average. But everyone wants to be normal.What's up with that?You can't imitate your way to excellence. It can be achieved only by breaking away from the pack, abandoning the status quo.But breaking away from the pack is also the way to spectacular failure.Are you beginning to understand why there is so little excellence in the world?A weird person who succeeds is called eccentric. A weird person who fails is called a loser. Most people just walk the middle path and wonder what might have been.If there is, somewhere, a Book of Days, what will be written in it about you? Will the book say you played it safe, never took a chance and were buried in such-and-such a place?I think Tom Peters gave excellent advice to managers when he said, “Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes.”The New York Times tells us, “She embarked on a show-business career at 15 by going to Manhattan and enrolling in John Murray Anderson's dramatic school. From the first, she was repeatedly told she had no talent and should return home. She tried and failed to get into four Broadway chorus lines, so she became a model for commercial photographers. She won national attention as the Chesterfield Cigarette Girl in 1933. This got her to Hollywood as a Goldwyn chorus girl. For the next two years she played unbilled, bit roles in two dozen movies. She then spent seven years at RKO, where she got leading roles in low-budget movies. But she was wrongly cast and mostly wasted in films.”In all, Lucille Ball appeared in 72 B-movies before she became too old to be credible as a female love-interest. Her lackluster career on the silver screen ended without fanfare in 1948. So at the age of 37, Lucy left the movies, swallowed her pride and became Liz Cooper on the live radio show, My Favorite Husband.Jess Oppenheimer, her director, tells the story. “I remember telling Lucy, 'Let go. Act it out. Take your time.' But she was simply afraid to try. So one day, at rehearsal, I handed Lucy a couple of Jack Benny tickets. She looked at me blankly. 'What are these for?''I want you to go to school,' I told her.It did the trick. When Lucy came into the studio for the next rehearsal, I could see she was excited. 'Oh my God, Jess,' she gushed, 'I didn't realize!'She just couldn't wait to get started trying out the new, emancipated attitude she had discovered. On that week's show Lucy really hammed it up, playing it much broader than she ever had before. She coupled this with her newfound freedom of movement, and there were times I thought we'd have to catch her with a butterfly net to get her back to the microphone. The audience roared their approval, and Lucy loved it. So did I.”Released from her fear, Lucy Ricardo had been born.In 1951, a middle-aged Lucy leaped out from our black-and-white television screens into every living room in America. “To say that Lucille Ball was a phenomenon is an understatement. Through sheer determination and hard work, this one woman fundamentally changed the broadcast industry forever.” – Susan Lacy, winner of 5 Emmys as executive producer of American MastersMost people, when they finally become successful, become conservative. Fearful of losing what they've gained, they abandon the behaviors that brought them success. But not Lucy. As the fearless owner of Desilu Studios, she took two enormous chances: Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. American television would never be the same.On April 27, 1989, the New York Times ran her obituary. Its last few sentences were these:Addressing a group of would-be actors, she said the best way to get along with tough directors was “don't die when they knock you down.” She said she was very shy at the start of her career, but overcame it when “it finally occurred to me that nobody cared a damn.”Associates called Miss Ball self-reliant, sympathetic and sometimes tempestuous. ''Life is no fun,'' she once said, ''without someone to share it with.''Miss Ball is survived by her husband, her daughter, her son and three grandchildren.Funeral plans were incomplete last night.Lucille Ball failed often and well, seeing failure only as a form of education. She broke the old rules and wrote new, redheaded ones, inspiring you and me to do the same.When you leave behind a legacy of courage, are funeral plans – or even funerals – ever really “complete?”Roy H. Williams

Relentless repetition was once enough to drive your message home. But it isn't quite that simple anymore. The impact of your message in this over-communicated hour depends largely on the structural basis of your statements.A statement is either fact-based or values-based.A fact-based statement must be true or false. If true, it is a correct statement. If false, it is incorrect. But it is a fact-based statement either way.Fact-based statements can be proven or disproven objectively. They cannot, by nature, include opinion. But the 'truth' of a values-based statement hinges on agreed-upon values. Consequently, values-based statements have the look and feel of fact-based statements to persons of the same opinion.“Our parking lot has spaces for 38 cars” is a fact-based statement. It can be proven or disproven objectively. Just count the spaces. Personal values and opinions don't matter.“There's always plenty of parking” is a values-based statement. (How much parking, exactly, is 'plenty'?)“D-color diamonds are more rare than J-color diamonds,” is a fact-based statement.“D-color diamonds are more beautiful than J-color diamonds,” is a values-based statement. (And in my opinion, entirely untrue.)“The Academy Reunion and Open House is October 15 on the new campus of Wizard Academy,” is a fact-based statement.“We've planned some fabulous surprises for you,” is values based.“Iraq has weapons of mass destruction” is a fact-based statement.“Saddam Hussein is a bad ruler” is entirely values-based.Calm down. I use that example only to illustrate how quickly disagreements can arise over statements that are values-based.Modern advertising overflows with values-based statements: “Big selection.” “High quality.” “Low prices.” “Easy credit.” Even though these statements may be true in the mind of the advertiser, the public has heard them all before.The left hemispheres of our brains detect fact-based statements and prefer them to statements that are values-based. Having been suffocated by hype for the past 40 years, we hunger today for statements of fact.Seven years ago I wrote a chapter called The 12 Most Common Mistakes in Advertising. Among those mistakes was, “4. Unsubstantiated claims. Advertisers often claim to have what the customer wants, such as 'highest quality at the lowest price,' but fail to offer any evidence. An unsubstantiated claim is nothing more than a cliché the prospect is tired of hearing. You must prove what you say in every ad. Do your ads give the prospect new information? Do they provide a new perspective? If not, prepare to be disappointed with the results.” Today I accelerate that statement: If you would persuade today's hype-resistant customer, you must learn to make fact-based statements in your ads.Specifics are more believable than generalities.Roy H. Williams

Do you want more free time? Then you must buy it. Free time is never free.There are only four ways you can buy free time:1. Work fewer hours. Learn to say no. You'll have more free time immediately.Cost: Lost opportunities, reduced income.2. Develop systems, methods and procedures that save time.Cost: Time and money spent in developing those systems, methods and procedures.3. Recruit, hire, train and manage other people to do your work for you.Cost: Time and money spent in recruiting, hiring, training and managing.I heartily recommend these three methods. But I recommend against number four:4. Be the recipient of a large inheritance or insurance settlement, win the lottery, marry a rich person.Cost: Loss of identity, loss of self.That last statement will surely win me a flurry of emails from angry “happy people” who married someone rich. “How dare you say that! I married a rich person and my life has been full and complete.” Okay, so you're the rare exception. But I'm sure you'll agree that money is an insulator. It shields us from problems, and perhaps that's good. But it shields us from challenges as well. Money is the glove that keeps us from feeling the texture and ripples of life.Nothing is so rewarding as making a difference. Especially when it involves self-sacrifice. But when a challenge can be overcome by the mere stroke of your pen, the reward always seems less intimate. Is this perhaps what Jesus meant when he said, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven?” (Note to Anxious Expositors: that question was rhetorical. I'm not really asking what Jesus meant, okay?)In the tenth chapter of Mark's history, a wealthy young man asks Jesus how to receive life. Mark tells us, “Jesus looked at him and loved him.”Okay, so far so good. Jesus really likes this guy and wants to help him experience the visceral joy he craves. “One thing you lack,” Jesus said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and come, follow me.”Mark reports the young man walked away sad. Removing the glove of wealth was, for him, a price too high to pay for joy.Please note that neither Mark nor I are insinuating that it was the young man's moral duty to liquidate his holdings. Jesus was merely pointing out the high emotional cost of wearing the glove of wealth.What's my point? Only this: excitement and reward exist only outside your comfort zone. You'll experience neither of them until you make yourself do something you really don't want to do.So what is it that scares the hell out of you?Roy H. Williams

We Baby Boomers had beautiful dreams back in the '60s and '70s, but we didn't do much about them. It was enough back in those days just to “Visualize World Peace” and sing wistfully about a brighter tomorrow. Remember John Lennon's song, Imagine?Imagine no possessions.I wonder if you can.No need for greed or hunger,A brotherhood of man.Imagine all the peopleSharing all the world…You may say I'm a dreamer,but I'm not the only one,I hope some day you'll join us,And the world will live as one.But dreaming didn't change the world. We don't all live in a yellow submarine.Those who have heard me explain Society's 40-year Pendulum will recall my conviction that we're in the third year of a new generational cycle that will be remembered for its small-but-effective actions rather than its grand-but-impotent dreams. This new worldview is clearly communicated in the recent movie, Batman Begins, when Bruce Wayne's childhood friend says to him, “It's not who you are inside, but what you do that defines you.”Two weeks ago I made my famous Pendulum presentation to the good folks of Procter and Gamble at their world headquarters in Cincinnati. They loved it; said it explained a lot of weird phenomena they're seeing. Last week I presented it to the senior execs of Clear Channel Communications. They, too, were deeply moved. I'll be doing it one more time on October 15 at the Wizard Academy Reunion and Open House in Austin. Are you coming?Remember what I'm about to tell you: 2006 and 2007 will be years in which the world of advertising changes in tumultuous ways. You can ride these waves of change to the far horizon or you can attempt to tread water, stay where you are, and fight the undertow. I'll be talking about these coming changes on October 15 as well.Free the Beagle.Roy H. Williams

It was a term once used to describe exceptional jazz musicians. African-Americans spelled it “hepcat,” while their white counterparts heard “cat” and assumed “hep” to be a modifier. Hence, “hep cat.”In 1942 Bob Clampett created the first color Looney Tunes cartoon, The Hep Cat, featuring an unnamed feline that would later develop a lisp and become known as Sylvester, (derived from silvestris, the scientific name for the cat species.) Soon, people were being referred to as all kinds of cats, as in cool cat, crazy cat, and “hep” became “hip.”And it all came from the African Wolof word “hipikat,” meaning, “someone finely attuned to his/her environment.” Makes sense, right? An inspired improv from a blower in sync with his fellow jazz musicians would trigger the rejoinder “hipikat” from a bystander familiar with the African word. Anglos heard “hep cat” and a new, misheard word was born.Language is an interesting thing. If you enjoyed that brief summary of “hep cat,” then you're definitely my brand of crazy. I enjoyed it, too. Arooo! Aroo-Arooooo!New subject: Winning a RaceNothing changes when you win a footrace. But the person who wins the hearts of men and women can wonderfully change the future. Do you have the skill to win the eye, the ear, the doubting heart? Can you win the human race?Wizard Academy is a school of the communication arts. The majority of our students come to us to learn how to create ads that will make them money, make presentations that will make them money, or win promotions at work that will make them money. The footrace of business holds a magnetic attraction; it never ceases to draw a crowd, easily winning the mind and wallet. Please don't think I'm disparaging it.But the heart, the heart, remains in the hands of the arts. Journalists and novelists and screenwriters and musicians, painters and poets, playwrights and performers, sculptors and singers, architects and photographers shape our ever-changing mood and guide us toward the future. Artists such as these are attending Wizard Academy in increasing numbers since the methods and principles we teach are just as easily applied to the arts as they are to business.Alumni interested in furthering their knowledge of the heart-arts will be delighted to know that discussions are continuing with acad-grad David Freeman to bring his paradigm-expanding Visual Emotioneering course to Wizard Academy. David is currently the object of an epic tug-of-war, with Hollywood pulling him into movies and Japan pulling him into video games. Both are willing to pay whatever it takes, but David really wants to hang with his homies at the Academy. Stay tuned.Another Acad-grad Writes a Big Book: Bag the Elephant(subtitled, How to Win and Keep BIG Customers.)Steve Kaplan is the nicest guy you'll ever meet, the boy every mom wishes her daughter would bring home for dinner. He could easily have been a regular on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.So did Steve became rich as a salesman because he was nice, or in spite of it? In his new book, Steve tells you exactly how he bagged the elephants, and how you can, too. I strongly suggest you pick up a copy at your local bookstore, or order one at amazon.com, (discounted there to just $13.57 in hardback.) Grab it now, before the first printing is all sold out and a waiting list is formed. And keep your eye on the bestseller lists. Wizard Academy grads are on the move.Join us, and become hipikat.Roy H. Williams

Media fragmentation and the evolution of social values are forcing advertisers to spend more and more money to reach fewer and fewer people. Two weeks ago I mentioned the possibility of using non-traditional media (NTM) as a supplement to your advertising. One of the most effective forms of NTM today is Corporate Art.Think of it as advertising, but of a permanent sort.What are the landmarks in your town?The faces on Mt. Rushmore were funded by the state of South Dakota to bring tourism and money to the state. It worked.That famous hillside HOLLYWOOD sign was erected to sell lots in a 1920's Los Angeles subdivision. It worked.America's most precious paintings of the romantic West were originally commissioned by railroads to be published in magazine ads and on calendars in an effort to stimulate travel by rail. It worked. Taos and Sedona and Santa Fe are thriving today because of the romantic glow of those ads.In fact, many of our most important cultural icons began as corporate art: Cinderella's Castle at Disney World. The Chrysler Building in New York. Rockefeller Center. Times Square. Carnegie Hall. Each of these is architectural, corporate art.Standing 76 feet tall, Tulsa's kitschy corporate art is the Golden Driller, a mammoth oilman with his hand atop a drilling rig, a gift to the city of Tulsa from Mid-Continent Supply Company in 1953. Having grown up there, I can tell you that no other icon is as deeply associated with the town. The Golden Driller's image is everywhere.According to Wizard of Ads partner Sonja Howle, Corporate Art:1. Communicates (A) your brand essence. (B) the core values of your company.2. Stimulates employee pride.3. Can be used repeatedly (A) to cut costs in ad production, (B) on calendars, invitations, thank-you cards, etc.4. Triggers community recognition, opens a door for press coverage.5. Offers tax benefits.6. Appreciates as a corporate asset.7. Establishes an ongoing legacy.Does your company have something to say to the world that might be expressed in art?We'll talk a little more about Corporate Art as a Tool of Marketing – as well as several other iterations of NTM – at the upcoming Academy Reunion and Open House on Oct. 15.See you there.Roy H. Williams

I am, for the moment, alive and well as an ad writer. But I feel I'm being stalked by iPods, cell phones, instant messaging, and increasingly fragmented media choices. And they're all gunning for my life.Over-communication rides rampant across the mindscape of America, putting greater-than-ever pressure on ad writers to create ads that produce results.Today I will teach you how to write such ads.The opening line is the key to impact. So open big. I'm not talking about hype; “Save up to 75 percent off this week only at blah, blah blah.” I'm talking about a statement that is fundamentally more interesting than what had previously occupied your customer's mind.Wasn't your attention piqued by the opening line, “I Did Not Die Today?” Magnetism is why I chose it. Frankly, I had no idea how I was going to bridge from that opening line into the subject matter at hand. But it can always be done.Be bold and have confidence; a bridge can be built from any concept to any other concept.Here's a glimpse of an advanced technique I call Chaotic Ad Writing:1. Don't consider your subject matter before deciding how to introduce it.2. Never open with “ad-speak.” especially one of those insultingly obvious questions directed at the customer, such as, “Are you interested in saving money?” These questions are so overused they've deteriorated into horrible clichés. Provocative rhetorical questions are okay however, such as “Whatever happened to Gerald Ford?”3. Think of a magnetic opening statement from way beyond the fence in left field; something certain to captivate.4. Figure out how to bridge from that opener into your subject matter.5. The opening line will surprise Broca's Area of the brain and gain you entrance to the central executive of working memory, conscious awareness, focused attention. The central executive will then decide whether the thought has relevance to the listener. This is what your bridge must supply.6. Write a bridge that justifies your magnetic opening line. If you fall short here, your opener will be perceived as hype. Game over.7. Insert your subject matter into the seam created by your opening line and bridge.8. Close by looping back to your opening line.It's really not that hard.Hey, that's another good opener: “It's really not that hard.” You could easily bridge from that opening line into a powerful ad for any product or service.Here are some other openers for you to try:“I've heard your heart stops when you sneeze.”“I like the TV commercials with the Keebler elves.”“Plutonium is the rarest of all substances.”Here's what I've done so far:1. I opened with “I Did Not Die Today,” having absolutely no idea how I would bridge from that line into the subject matter of this memo.2. I created a bridge to justify my opening line: “I am, for the moment, alive and well as an ad writer. But I feel I'm being stalked by iPods, cell phones, instant messaging and increasingly fragmented media choices. And they're all gunning for my life.”3. I gave you details to satisfy the central executive's demand for relevance: “Over-communication rides rampant across the mindscape of America, putting greater-than-ever pressure on ad writers to create ads that produce results for the customer. Today I will teach you how to write such ads.”4. I inserted my subject matter into the seam created by my opening line and bridge; I gave you a new writing technique.5. Now it's time to close by looping back to the opening line. Let's see if I can do it:The times are changing, and so must ad writers if we will live to see another day. Will you change with the times? Or will you continue to wear the blindfold of yesterday's ad-writing style and walk voluntarily before the firing squad?Roy H. Williams

Do you remember the Seinfeld episode where Jerry, George and Elaine are waiting for a table in a Chinese restaurant? The plot revolves around the fact that George is desperate to make a phone call but the other guy won't get off the pay phone. That was 1991. The fact that somebody might have a phone in their pocket was unthinkable.How about the Bubble Boy episode where Jerry and Elaine's car gets separated from George and Susan's car on the highway? Again the plot revolves around the fact that there's no possible way for them to reach each other. That was 1993.Not many years ago I bought a new Mercedes with a factory telephone mounted in the console. The handset was corded like a standard desk phone. No one thought it looked ridiculous. That car was a 1999 model.180 million Americans now carry cell phones in their purses or pockets and many of these are able to receive full-motion video. Newspaper, radio and television are no longer the new kids on the block. Even Ted Turner's cable and Japan's VHS tapes – once the bold new voices of a brave tomorrow – have become weary, bleary and stale.Like it or not, we're entering an age of non-traditional media.As I warned you 14 months ago, media is losing its mass. Each moment we're online is a moment we're not reading the newspaper or watching TV. Each minute we spend listening to a CD or an iPod is a minute we're not listening to the radio. None of these technologies will deal a deathblow to traditional mass media, but only a fool would contend they're not collectively shrinking it.Please hear me right: Mass media isn't going to go away or “quit working.” It's merely going to become less effective than it has been in the past. This is why the 41 worldwide Wizard of Ads partners are aggressively investigating NTM, or “non-traditional media,” including product placement in video games and news shows, localized ads on satellite radio, hyperlinks from blogs, streaming video-on-demand to cell phones, and other new voices in the information avalanche.Six years ago, the Monday Memo you're reading right now was distributed only by FAX. Email wasn't really viable as a replacement. Six. Short. Years.You and I are surrounded by glittering new technologies. Our attitudes about advertising are evolving as well. In short, we're no longer entirely a “me” generation. Our kids are teaching us to become an interconnected “we,” saying, “Your advertising may fool one of us, but that one will tell the rest of us.”The most powerful of today's non-traditional media are also the most overlooked:1: Word of Mouth. It can be bought. But do you know how?2: Your Sales Staff. Are they winning converts, or merely making sales?3: Your Website. Would you like to see it finally start working?A few weeks ago I told you to set aside October 15 to attend the Wizard Academy reunion and open house and promised that details would be announced “in a few weeks.”Here are those promised details.I'll be making virgin presentations on 3 new topics:1. Direct Marketing: the equal-but-opposite corollary to Branding.2. Non-Traditional Media: what's coming, what's already here, and how to use it NOW.3. Word of Mouth: How to plan it and buy it like any other media.Space limitations at the new campus dictate that we accept only the first 200 registrants. Sorry, but if your name isn't on the master list, you won't get past the security guard. We deeply regret that it has to be this way, but the Monday Memo subscriber list has grown too large for us to not put limitations on our invitations.Robert Frost and Ponyboy were right; nothing gold can stay.Come to Austin October 15 and see the treasure map that reveals where tomorrow's gold is buried.Roy H. Williams

COURTESY NOTE: This is one of those days when I write about something other than business.Have you ever been in a K-Mart during a “flashing blue light special?” The sad circus begins when an employee rolls out a chrome cart with a rotating blue light on a pole about 8 feet high. A voice on the intercom says, “Attention K-Mart shoppers,” and then tells you know how lucky you are to be in the store right now. They're about to offer an unadvertised special. Just follow the flashing blue light.Watching those poor people follow that light is profoundly sad to me. It's the reason I quit shopping at K-Mart.Our world is full of flashing blue lights that cause us to lose our focus and forget the reason we're here. Is there a blue light in your life right now?Blue lights often arrive as an adversary that begs to be defeated.No, I'm not talking about the war in Iraq. I'm talking about you and the distractions that cause you to forget your real purpose.Have you allowed the merely urgent to replace the truly important?I've made this memo short to help you justify taking a few minutes from your crazy schedule to just sit and think about what life is really all about.Do it now. For yourself, and the people you love.The world will wait.Roy H. Williams

Okay, let's be clear about this: I'm proud of myself today. So proud, in fact, that you might want to skip reading this memo because all I'm going to do is strut. It could become sickening. Seriously.Frankly, I can't believe you're still reading after a warning like that.First it was Dr. Burkhardt Maess of the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience who proved my longstanding assertion that Broca's area of the brain anticipates the predictable. (This is important to you and me because Predictability is the killer of attention. If we want to gain and hold human attention, we must know how to stimulate Broca.)Now neurologist Friedemann Pulvermuller of the Medical Research Council in Cambridge has shocked the scientific community by announcing that Wernicke's area and Broca's area gather sensory data from other brain areas and then compile it into complex mental images. According to the article, “These results challenge the theory that isolated, language-specific brain structures discern word meanings. Instead, they propose word understanding hinges on activation of interconnected brain areas that pull together knowledge about that particular word and its associated actions and sensations.”Anyone who has attended one of my public seminars since 1996 has heard me explain this whole “pulling sensory data from associated areas” process in detail. I wrote about it in a series of Monday Morning Memos in 2001 and 2002 and then finally laid the matter to rest with the April, 2003 publication of the audiobook with transcript, Thought Particles: Binary Code of the Mind. Its description says, “This limited-edition insight contains one audio CD and one illustration CD unveiling the Wizard's theories on how thoughts are assembled in the mind from stored sensory associations.”Why does any of this matter? Because the purpose of Wizard Academy is to forward the expansion of the communication arts.Our goal is to teach you how to more effectively change:1. what people think, and2. how they feel.To do this, we must study how thoughts and feelings are gathered, stored, processed, and retrieved from memory.Last week I wrote, “Wizard Academy is a school of the communication arts. We study all the languages of the mind, including shape, color, position, ratio, pitch, key, tempo, contour, musical interval, rhythm and architecture. But words have been the highest form of communication since Genesis chapter one, when God spoke a universe into existence and then created us in his image.”But that is not to say that words are the only language of the mind. Wizard Academy is in the process of expanding its curricula to include investigations into the languages of:1. music2. color3. shapes and symbols4. ritual (as the language of a sports or business tribe)5. phonemes6. schema and worldview (as boundaries to understanding)7. meter8. mathematics (as a language of business, with emphasis on the ratios mentioned on pages 144-145 of Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads.If you're an academy grad and would like to be considered as a possible instructor for one of these or another new curricula, please let [email protected] know of your field of interest and your current depth of research into it.Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to march around the room and sing the Poky Little Puppy song at the top of my lungs (pages 192-193 of Secret Formulas.)Roy H. Williams

One of these days I'm going to calculate the odds of pulling away from a drive-thru window and actually finding what was ordered in the bag.For 3 years I've been calculating the odds of getting extra lemon for your tea when you add the phrase “lots of lemon, please” in America's better restaurants. Currently, this request will get you some small quantity of extra lemon 47.4 percent of the time; usually a single, sad slice alongside the sliver you were going to get anyway.If you really want “lots of lemon,” you must raise the impact quotient of your message; paint a bigger picture in the mind. Smile and say, “I'd like iced tea with so many lemons that they slide off the table onto the floor. I'm talking about this restaurant being knee-deep in lemons when I leave, so many lemons that it takes two men and a little boy to carry them all. Will you do that for me?”Do I get lots of lemon when I say this? Yes. Do I enjoy doing it? No. Do I think it's witty, cute, clever, funny? No.I do it because I want the lemons.What do you want? And how have you been asking for it?Do you typically assume that people are paying attention when you speak? E. M. Cioran said, “If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.” I fear he was probably right.The key to being understood is to raise the impact quotient of your message.Have you figured out yet that we're talking about advertising? And sermons? And classroom lectures? And effective web copy? And blockbuster screenplays? And Pulitzer prize winning journalism?The higher the impact quotient of your message, the less repetition is required to enter into declarative memory. The higher the impact quotient, the bigger the scene painted on the visuospatial sketchpad of working memory in the dorsolateral prefrontal association area of the brain.Wizard Academy is a school of the communication arts. We study all the languages of the mind, including shape, color, position, ratio, pitch, key, tempo, contour, musical interval, rhythm and architecture. But words have been the highest form of communication since Genesis chapter one, when God spoke a universe into existence and then created us in his image.Learn to harness the power of words. Can you name anything else that will make as big a difference in your life?Roy H. Williams

Earth's population reached 1 billion persons in 1804, 2 billion in 1927, 3 billion in '59, 4 billion in '74 and 5 billion in late '86. And on October 12th, 1999, Earth's population surpassed 6 billion.The number of passengers on Spaceship Earth has doubled (from 3 billion – 1959, to 6 billion – 1999,) in 40 short years. But we're not discussing population growth today, I'm just opening your eyes to perceptual reality.The cognoscenti of Magical Worlds will remember a brief discussion of perceptual reality at the beginning of class. “Each of you will sit in this room for 3 days and hear the same information presented in precisely the same way. But you'll leave here having had an entirely different experience from the persons on your left and your right. You will connect different dots, have different epiphanies, make different associations. Objective reality will be the same for each of you. But your perceptual realities will be yours alone.”There are 525,948.766 minutes in a year. This means that each minute, the 6 billion of us experience a collective 11,408 years of perceptual reality. And each day we live a collective 16,427,455 years.Given that we lived nearly sixteen and a half million years yesterday, it seems like one of us would've figured out how to end poverty, crime and war, doesn't it? (Personally, I was really busy, so I was counting on you.)Today's illustration is an image of the famous mime, Marcel Marceau, superimposed over a photo of Earth with snapshots of women and men on its surface. To the right is the cover of Paul Finley's awesome 14 Windows guitar CD.You, reader, saw the same image as 30,000 other subscribers, but your perception was yours alone. You may have been confused by the image, amused by it, intrigued by it, or mildly or strongly disturbed by it. Perhaps you even saw a symbolic statement being made. I did not intend one.Perceptual reality is yours alone.Every door of opportunity begins as a window in your mind.Look through that window of imagination and glimpse a world that could be, someday. Keep looking… Be patient… And watch it grow into a door of Opportunity through which you might pass into an entirely different future.Opportunity never knocks. But it hangs thick in the air all around you. You breathe it unthinking, and dissipate it with your sighs.Opportunity never knocks. It appears, flickering, like faulty neon at a nondescript fork in the road.Opportunity never knocks. It whispers, a tickle in your distracted mind.So what are you going to do? Will you sleep, unaware of the miracles that need your assistance, or will you open your eyes, look through that window, and begin doing what only you can do?Roy H. Williams

Last week a client achieved 42 percent of his market potential. Never before had I seen a business break the 40 percent barrier. It was kind of like seeing someone run a four-minute mile. I knew it was possible in theory, but I never thought I'd actually see it.Ben had come to Austin for his annual marketing retreat. After the usual pleasantries, he said, “Traffic is flat, sales are flat, and I'm not happy.”“Ben, you've done everything that can be done. You've trained your staff, created a tantalizing compensation structure for them, advertised relentlessly, added every conceivable product line that might increase your attractiveness to your customer, refined your purchasing methods so that your prices are visibly better, built a fabulous new store for the comfort of your customers, and through it all, not one of your competitors has awakened.”“Are you saying that 3 and a half million is all that can be done in my town?” he bristled.Looking him calmly in the eyes, I carefully enunciated a single word: “Evidently.”Business owners, I tell Ben's story to give you a glimpse of the Realities of the Marketplace:1. Impact Quotient. How powerful is your message compared to your competitors'? This is the Impact Quotient of your message, whether it's delivered through mass media, face-to-face by your salespeople, or word-of-mouth by your customers to their friends. Advertising is more effective when you have something to say.2. Market Size/Ad Budget Ratio. How big is your town relative to your ad budget? The more populated the trade area, the more expensive it is to advertise. How able are you?3. Competitive Environment. How good are you at what you do? More importantly, how good are your competitors and how many of them are there? Each of them is going to retain some customers regardless of what you do.4. Market Potential. What is the potential of your trade area? The total dollars spent in your product category is a not a number you're likely to change. The question is, what percentage of that total will be yours?Do you know your category's market potential in your trade area? Can you name the degree of your market penetration?Until a business achieves 4 to 6 percent of their market potential, they usually lack the financial steam to sustain a serious move on the marketplace. But when they've accumulated sufficient cash and courage, the ride to 25 percent is wooly and wonderful. Growing from 25 to 33 percent is much harder than the jump from 5 to 25. And creeping from 33 to 40 happens only when you're blessed with very weak competitors.Ben's total trade area contains 125,000 people. Statistically, they'll spend 67 dollars per person/per year in his product category. This gives Ben a market potential of 8,375,000 dollars. Growing from half a million to 2.1 million was fun and easy. Growing from 2.1 to 3.5 required Ben to stretch his comfort zone far beyond what most business owners would have been willing to consider. No stone has been left unturned in the 7 years we've been working together.“Ben, the way I see it, you've got four choices:1. Fire us and hire an ad firm that will tell you what you want to hear.2. Start a new business in an unrelated category in your town.3. Launch your existing category in another town.4. Shut up and be happy with what you've accomplished.”I knew that Ben would never do number 4. I figured he'd go for number 2, or possibly even number 1. To my surprise, he immediately picked number 3. “Roy,” he said, “You may not remember it, but you told me three years ago when I built the new store that I needed to be thinking about what I was going to do next. You said building that store was the final thing I might do to improve volume in my town. It looks like you were right.”We spent the rest of that day evaluating towns for an excited Ben to visit in 4 different states. He's on the road picking one now, and then we'll start climbing again.Business can be fun when you work with people of courage.Do you?This week we've spoken about marketplace realities. Next week I'll tell you about a reality of a different sort.Roy H. Williams

If you want to glimpse the inner forces that drive an organization, you need only observe their methods and listen to their words. Especially when they're not paying attention.Words and methods reveal motives. Listen to a person carefully and you will hear the beating of their heart. Do what they do and you'll become who they are. So be careful whose advice you take and whose methods you adopt.You cannot use the tools of another without placing your hands where their hands have been. Desire their outcome, adopt their methods, and you embrace the values that are hidden beneath.Advertising in America got twisted and bent when it became fashionable to read The Art of War.The most commonly used words in marketing today are “target” and “objective.” Strange ideas for retailers, don't you think, when their goals are to attract and serve? Let's replace those two words, then, and see how it affects the heart.Advertising consultants, instead of asking, “Who is your target?” why not ask, “Who are we hoping to attract?” Instead of asking “What is our objective? ask, “How are we hoping to serve?” Prepare yourself for strange and revealing reactions to these questions because while it's fashionable to spout about having “great service,” few want to truly serve.Business people, do you want to attract multitudes? Develop the heart of a servant – one who truly loves – and you will quickly become beloved. The world has masters aplenty; it is servants who are in short supply.I'm not the first to note how words and actions reveal the heart. Luke tells of a dawn two thousand years ago when Jesus walked grass still wet with dew. After choosing from among a great crowd of followers the twelve who would accompany him to the end, Jesus stepped forward and spoke to the waiting throng, “The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.”Now let's look at Jesus' actions – beginning with his choosing of the twelve – and see if they reveal his motives: The fact that none of them were leaders in the business community indicates that he wasn't planning to measure membership or attendance numbers, build a bank account or launch a political action committee. “Minister” was more of a verb in his day.Flash forward to his final day in John 13: “… so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples' feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.” The twelve were aghast. Foot washing was like scrubbing a public toilet or scraping gum off the bottom of bus benches. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” Jesus asked them. “I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.”Consciously or unconsciously, each of us follows a hero. We model our actions after their actions and measure our success according to their values. Are you consciously aware of whose example you are following? Look quietly to your daily actions and you'll find your hero vividly revealed.Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War five hundred years before Jesus felt the morning grass beneath his feet.Somehow I doubt he ever read it.Roy H. Williams

Marketing was easy in the old days. You had ABC, NBC and CBS, a local newspaper and half a dozen radio stations. That was it. There was no Fox, no WB, no cable channels, no FM radio and no such thing as a cell phone. You had to find a phone booth and a dime. When pay phones jumped to a quarter it was taken as a sign of the antichrist.I'm talking about the 1970s.Fax machines and VCRs did not exist for most of us until 1980. It took barely 10 years for them to become utterly indispensable and now they're becoming obsolete, kicked to the curb by email attachments, DVD machines and TiVo.The future is accelerating toward us. Take your eyes off the hurtling horizon – even for a moment – and the world will pass you by.It's time for you to get serious about a web site.Yes, in that list of things that didn't exist in 1980, I failed to mention personal computers, the biggest world-changer of them all.World-changing, let's talk about it.Recently, one of our graduates sat down to dinner at the old Clark Gable estate with 4 other World Changers:1. the president of a major television network2. a recent candidate for the Presidency of the United States3. the man whose name is attached to all the most spectacular hotels in Las Vegas4. a money man whose name you would instantly recognize if I were to say it.They gathered to discuss a project being headed by my friend. I hope to be able to tell you more about this project soon, as it potentially involves Wizard Academy.Another of our graduates is directing the worldwide Research and Development efforts of the US government to defeat bio-terrorism. If he is successful, Anthrax, Ebola, SARS, AIDS and other infectious diseases will no longer be life-threatening. Let's pray that he succeeds.A third graduate is the head of Pentagon News. I'm always fascinated to hear his perspective on world events.But the graduates whose work is most likely to affect your personal life – the ones who can help you catch up to the future – are the Wizards of Web, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg.You know from recent memos that their book Call to Action became an international bestseller. Now, as a special favor to their alma mater, the Eisenbrothers have agreed to teach a world-changing 2-day event – Sept 8 and 9 – as a fundraiser to help build Engelbrecht House, the student mansion soon to be constructed on the campus of Wizard Academy. (No more renting of hotel rooms when you come to Austin!)You need to attend this event. No other investment will propel you as fast into the future. And at just $2,200 it's the bargain of the century. Academy graduates (and honorary graduates – those who have attended my public seminars) pay only half. Wow. That's only $1,100. Read the details of this one-time-only seminar – Call to Action – under Course Descriptions at wizardacademy.org.I wouldn't put it off if I were you.Roy H. Williams

Sometimes I go to funny places in my mind. Do you ever go exploring?Lately I've been imagining a world without oil. No oil for cars, no oil for 18-wheelers, no oil for jets. Not even any oil for construction equipment or ambulances. Same world, but smack out of oil. Can you see it?The funny thing is that it will happen. When that day comes, we may or may not have harnessed a renewable source of energy, but run out of oil we most certainly will. What will the history books say of you and me?The June 4, 2005 issue of The Economist tells us the Chinese are learning to drive. Last year they purchased more than 5 million cars, compared to the 17 million purchased by Americans. Next year they'll surpass the Japanese to become the second-largest car market on earth. And that's just the beginning. China's rumbling economic growth means that in just a few years she could buy 5 times as many cars as the US each year and consume as much oil as we currently use in half a decade.And you thought the price of gas was high.According to the most recent U.S. Geological Survey (2000,) there are 3,000 billion barrels of oil left in the world. Total oil production in 2000 was 25 billion barrels. So if world oil consumption increases at an average rate of 1.4 percent per year, the world's oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056. But that scenario doesn't consider the Chinese. If they punch the accelerator, our fifty-year supply could be gone in fifteen.The internet is looking more and more vital, is it not?I'm not trying to play Chicken Little here, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” My goal today is only to open the eyes of your imagination. There are lots of things to think that aren't being properly thunk, but if we all pitch in, we might be able to think them all. Here are just a few:Did J.M. Barrie intend for Peter Pan's ticking crocodile to represent how Time devours our youth? And if so, how deep does the symbolism run in this 100 year-old story?Jesus always “lifted his eyes toward heaven” when he prayed, so why do we always bow our heads and close our eyes?If color is a language, which colors are the verbs? What constitutes a verb in the language of music?Why do theoretical physicists not take the ideas of Julian Barbour more seriously?If your life ended today, what would you regret you had left undone?Sometimes it's good to go exploring in your mind.You can never be certain what you'll find.Roy H. Williams

Have you ever noticed how unhappy people always want to share their unhappiness with you? It may come in the form of a whine, a complaint, a rant, or sanctimonious “constructive criticism,” but come it most certainly will.The thing to remember when an unhappy person begins spraying unhappiness is this: It's not really about you. It's about them. And the wounds they carry. So try not to internalize it.Do you remember the Jewish father played by Roberto Benigni in Life is Beautiful? He illustrated the idea that happiness can be chosen in spite of unhappy circumstances; you are not a product of your environment. You are a product of your choices.Even weirder than unhappy people wanting to share their unhappiness with you is the fact that happy people generally keep their happiness to themselves. Why are we like this?I have a theory about leaving tips on tables at restaurants: the size of the tip isn't really an expression of your judgment regarding the quality of service you've received. It's an expression of your generosity, the bigness of your heart. It's not really about the waiter or waitress. It's about you.This idea can be especially fun when you receive truly abominable service. That's when you can leave a tip that's totally over the top and then smile all the way to your car as you contemplate all the different ways the story might end:1. The waiter, recognizing the tip as a gesture of love, pulls himself together and has a much-improved day, giving everyone exceptional service. Your ray of sunshine touches 276 lives before it fades into the memory of yesterday.2. The waiter, misinterpreting the tip as proof that it doesn't really matter whether or not he does a good job, continues his slacker attitude and reaps the life of mediocrity he deserves. But sometimes, late at night, he is haunted by the memory of the strange day he received a 20 dollar tip for serving a 7 dollar sandwich. What was that all about?3. The waiter, shamed by the monster tip he knows he didn't deserve, assumes it must have been meant for the cook. Your gift has now triggered a crisis of conscience. Will the waiter pass the tip along to the cook and grow as a human being? Or will he “steal” it and forever know himself to be a thief?4. The waiter, desperately needing the extra cash, accepts the tip as a gift from God. Congratulations, you are now an angel, God's messenger, a finger of His divine hand.5. The waiter, truly stupid, believes he deserves the tip and pockets it with bravado. Let him have his sad moment of glory. There won't be many like it in his life.The bottom line is this: People need love. Especially when they do not deserve it. And in the words of Iome Sylvarresta, “Love isn't something you feel. It's something you give.”Do something good today for a person who has done nothing to deserve it. Better yet, do something good for someone you don't even like.I promise you'll have a better day.Roy H. Williams

When business is slow, the wise business owner wonders what might be wrong with his business. The average business owner thinks only that something is wrong with his advertising. As I said last week, I believe it was advertising salespeople who taught business owners to think this way, saying, “The secret is to reach the right people. You've obviously been reaching the wrong ones.”But who, exactly, are “the right people” to buy a product no one wants?David Ogilvy once asked, “Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous.”William Bernbach echoed Ogilvy's statement. “Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it.”But it was Professor Charles Sandage who turned Ogilvy's complaint into a manifesto: “Advertising is criticized on the ground that it can manipulate consumers to follow the will of the advertiser. The weight of evidence denies this ability. Instead, evidence supports the position that advertising, to be successful, must understand or anticipate basic human needs and wants, and interpret available goods and services in terms of their want-satisfying abilities. This is the very opposite of manipulation.”Yet when traffic is slow, the accusing finger will usually point to advertising.Great ads flow from great products just as poetry flows from deep feelings. Telling a writer to write a great ad for a less-than-great product is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.To know the power of the ads that I might write for you, only two questions need be answered:1. How good are you at what you do?2. How good are your competitors? (Yes, you are being compared to everyone in your category whether you accept it or not. This is why the Wizard of Ads partners never attempt to write ads for a client until they have visited that client's competitors.)The writing of sparkling ads for a dull business is like putting lipstick on a pig. If advertising were all it took to grow businesses to their full potential, the faculty of Wizard Academy would not be so heavily invested in the development of New School sales training, Wonder Branding, internet Persuasion Architecture, Systematic Idea Generation, Online Video Introductions, Radio in the 21st Century, Blogging, and Public Relations.Soon my partner Mike Dandridge will release his new book, The One-Year Business Turnaround: Breakthrough Marketing Without Advertising. In that book, Mike will reveal fifty-two tested techniques that helped him build his electrical supply company to more than one million dollars a month in sales, even though he was challenged by Home Depot on the left and Lowe's on the right. Sound like something you might want to read?Yes, Wizard Academy is investigating growth techniques far beyond traditional advertising. Is it maybe time that your business did, too?Roy H. Williams

For years, advertisers have attempted to target “the right customer” through carefully selected media vehicles. Mailing lists aimed at specific demographic, geographic and psychographic profiles have fallen short so often that a 3 percent conversion rate is considered a big success. Carefully selected TV shows and radio formats have failed to deliver equally as often. And now email opt-in lists are disappointing a whole new generation of advertisers.Not surprisingly, it is media salespeople who are largely responsible for today's overemphasis on “reaching the right customer.” After all, if they told you the truth – that business reputations and advertising results are built on saying the right thing rather than reaching the right person – they would have no leverage to convince you that you need to reach exactly who they're trying to sell you.In your next ad, try targeting through the content of your message rather than through demographic profiles.There are four simple steps in creating a sharply targeted message:1. Choose whom to lose. You can't really know who you're targeting until you can name who you're not targeting. Inclusion is tied to exclusion. The Law of Magnetism is that attraction can be no stronger than repulsion. In the following example, I'm choosing to lose bargain-hunters and posers. (Not that there's anything wrong with bargain hunters or posers. In another campaign, I might target them with great success.) When you're saying the right thing, you'll be surprised at how many people suddenly become “the customer you needed to reach.”2. Gain their attention. If the reader/listener/viewer isn't with you, you're toast. We live in an over-communicated society whose attention has been fractured by too much media. So never assume that people will be paying attention to your ad. Assume instead that you must wrestle their thoughts away from powerful images and distractions that are tugging at their mind. “If the lowest price is all you're after, this isn't the camera for you.” That headline/opening statement attracts the quality conscious consumer to the same degree that it repels the bargain hunter. The only task remaining is for us to explain precisely why our camera is worth the premium price we ask.3. Surprise them with your candor. Traditional hype and ad-speak make today's customer deaf and blind. They can smell hype and phony promises and they're turning away from them in greater numbers every day. So bluntly tell them the truth. Confess the negative or they won't believe the positive. “Another downside of this camera is that it's not the sleekest, prettiest one in its price class. No one is going to tell you how cool your camera looks. The upside is that it takes far superior pictures.”4. Make it make sense. Believability is the key. Tell them how and why your product can deliver what it promises. “The prettiest camera in this price class has a shutter speed of 1/15th of a second. But the shutter speed of the ugly Canon PowerShot S500 is a superfast 1/60th of a second, allowing you to take fabulous photos in low-light situations. Your indoor photos will look rich and vibrant when all the others look dark and grainy. And your nighttime photos will make people's eyes bug out. Beautiful contrast and luminance, even without the flash. This camera can see in the dark. Take a picture of your lover in the moonlight. It will become your favorite photo ever. And that superfast shutter speed is also very forgiving of movement. That's why no one ever replaces their PowerShot S500. Go to your local pawnshop and see if you can find one. We're betting you can't. But you will see several of that “prettier” camera available cheaper than dirt. So if you're looking for a great price on a sleek-looking camera, that's probably where you should go.”See what I mean about choosing whom to lose? Are you beginning to understand the power of candor?I promise that targeting through copy works. But do you have the guts to do it?Learn to target through candid copy and then you can have fun laughing at all the media reps who try to convince you that you've got to reach precisely the audience they're selling.Roy H. Williams

If natural resources determined the wealth of nations, Brazil would be the richest country on earth and Japan would be the poorest. But resources have little to do with building a healthy economy.Prosperity happens when the swimming pool installer sells four pools in one month instead of the usual two and says, “I'm going to buy myself three new suits and a big television.”Then the TV salesman cocks his hat and says, “I'm going to dine out every night this week.”The haberdasher, having sold 3 suits more than usual, says, “I'm going to buy my wife a piece of jewelry, give each of the kids a new toy, and then take them all out for a fine dinner.”The next day the jeweler and the toy-store owner, each feeling good about the future, get measured for new clothes and make reservations for dinner on Friday night.The restaurateur begins thinking about having a swimming pool installed.Economic prosperity is rooted in desire and confidence – both of which are stimulated by advertising.That's why Wizard of Ads, Inc. is planning to open an office in Afghanistan.We Americans are good at convincing each other to buy stuff. It's what we do better than any other nation. Call us naïve, but my partners and I believe that better advertising can radically change the future.Does your future need changing?Get yourself to Austin, Texas, on June 17 for an all-day Free Seminar in lavish new Tuscan Hall on the campus of Wizard Academy, and if you can, try to stay the evening and watch the gaslights flicker to life in Chapel Dulcinea at sunset. It will be a day you'll never forget.See you then.Roy H. Williams

Are you one who believes the reliability of research is assured when the sample size is adequate and the respondents are properly qualified? If so, “research” will likely lead you to some tragic conclusions if it hasn't done so already.The problem with most research is that it's done by mathematical types who have little appreciation of the nuances of language. Ask a witness, “How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” and they will name a much higher speed than if they are asked, “How fast were the cars going when they made contact?” (This is not a speculative assertion. The full report can be found in Essentials of Human Memory by Dr. Alan Baddeley.)What's missing in most survey writers is an understanding of the illogic that we humans call logic.Neurologist Richard Cytowic was nominated for a Pulitzer in 1982. This is what he had to say in The Man Who Tasted Shapes: “My innate analytic personality had been reinforced by twenty years of training in science and medicine. I reflexively analyzed whatever passed my way and firmly believed that the intellect could conquer everything through reason. 'You need an antidote to your incessant intellectualizing,' Clark had once suggested, 'something to put you in touch with the irrational side of your mind.'… I had never considered that there might be more to the human mind than the rational part that I was familiar with. It had never once occurred to me that a force to balance rationality existed, let alone that it might be a normal part of the human psyche.”When Cytowic began to study this “force to balance rationality” he learned: “…some of our personal knowledge is off limits even to our own inner thoughts! Perhaps this is why humans are so often at odds with themselves, because there is more going on in our minds than we can ever consciously know.”“If a new soft drink came along that you thought tasted better than your current favorite, would you switch to it?”“Which of these two colas tastes better to you?”“Thank you for your opinion. You have been very helpful.”But when New Coke was introduced, America hated it. We were outraged, You're messing with our heritage! New Coke wasn't a genius marketing ploy to remind us of how much we loved old Coke. It was a genuine screw-up, fueled by millions in research.Joey Reiman, a founding partner of the BrightHouse Institute, (one of Coca-Cola's research partners) gave an interview to the New York Times on Oct 26, 2003. “Focus groups are ultimately less about gathering hard data and more about pretending to have concrete justifications for a hugely expensive ad campaign. 'The sad fact is, people tell you what you want to hear, not what they really think,' Reiman said. 'Sometimes there's a focus-group bully, a loudmouth who's so insistent about his opinion that it influences everyone else. This is not a science; it's a circus.'” The article went on to say: “Advertising's main tool, of course, has been the focus group, a classic technique of social science. Marketers in the United States spent more than $1 billion last year on focus groups, the results of which guided about $120 billion in advertising. But focus groups are plagued by a basic flaw of human psychology: people often do not know their own minds.”Ask a person to speculate about what they would do in a particular circumstance and they'll tell you what they truly believe they would do. But when the actual circumstance comes upon them, they do something else entirely. My advice: Quit asking people what they think. Begin watching what they do. Ignore their words; study their actions.Still not convinced that numbers are easily misinterpreted and misunderstood? In a recent Los Angeles Times article Peter Gosselin writes about economists who won the Nobel prize and then made poor personal investment decisions, sometimes even fumbling the Nobel prize money. He then took a look at the investment decisions of the faculty of Harvard University. His conclusion? The financial masterminds don't do any better than the average goober standing in line at the bowling alley.Remember the days prior to the bursting of the dotcom bubble? Everyone was talking about “eyeballs” under the assumption that web traffic could easily be translated into dollars. “It's just a numbers game.” The Internet was ruled by computer programmers and numbers have long been the language of Wall Street. But any time the flaws and foibles and inconsistencies of humanity are removed from the persuasion equation and the chant begins, “Numbers don't lie,” engineers, programmers, researchers and investors will align themselves into a magnificent fool's parade. And then, when the bubble bursts because the fundamental assumption was wrong, they blame it on the introduction of “unforeseen forces.”My partners Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg tried to warn the dotcom world, but no one in those days listened. Jeff and Bryan's heretical not

Features and benefits, features and benefits, features and benefits. We've polished our pitches to such a degree that we've dimmed our abilities to persuade. The customer is only half listening because the inner self is asking, “What are they not telling me?”Those who have heard my 90-minute presentation about the ongoing evolution of Western communication style are familiar with the problem:1. The fine art of Hype has been perfected and refined.2. Western culture has been submerged in it, held under until every last pore of our souls has been saturated.3. Consequently, we've developed an immunity to “ad-speak,” the language of hype.4. But we don't rage against it. We see the half-truth of hype as a fact of life.5. That's why we're ignoring it.6. And we're ignoring it in greater numbers every day.Do you want to surprise Broca, gain the attention of your customer and win back your credibility? Learn to name features, benefits, and downside. Trust me, the customer is already trying to figure out the downside. Why not just tell them? It's the best possible way to insulate yourself from the backlash when they finally figure it out for themselves.This powerful “tell the truth” technique is easily perverted into just another oily sales trick when the downside you name isn't the real one. As Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld observed 350 years ago, “We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones.”I'm saying confess the big ones. Knock your customers flat with your candor. Yes, it will cost you a few sales you might otherwise have made. But it will make you far more sales than it costs you.People aren't as stupid as you think.Roy H. Williams

“…And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. Then a voice said to him, 'What are you doing here, Elijah?'” – from the 1st book of Kings, chapter 19When Elijah focused on his own strength, his knees got weak, his hand began to tremble and his heart melted away. But as long as he kept his vision focused on his mission, he was filled with vitality and confidence and did miraculous things.Where is your vision focused?I have endured much questioning about The Quixote Collection at Tuscan Hall. People say, “Wasn't Don Quixote a delusional madman and a laughingstock? Why would you be taken with such a one?”Here is my answer. As long as Don Quixote's heart was filled with Dulcinea he overcame impossible odds. It was only after his friends convinced him Dulcinea did not exist that his heart shriveled within him.Each of us needs Dulcinea, a sense of mission and purpose. For without it, there can be no adventure.An itinerant preacher from Nazareth said, “If your vision is focused, your whole body will be full of light. But if your vision is unfocused, the light that is in you will be darkness. And if the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” One of the ways Mathew 6:22 can be interpreted is this: “If a mission consumes you, your life will be filled with optimism, creativity and stamina. But if no purpose fills your heart, the echo of its emptiness will fill your mind with a mournful song.”I believe that millions flounder and whine and are depressed because they refuse to sell their lives to something bigger than they are. They are sad because they have no purpose. Stephen Crane spoke of the power of purpose this way:A man saw a ball of gold in the sky;He climbed for it,And eventually he achieved it —It was clay.Now this is the strange part:When the man went to the earthAnd looked again,Lo, there was the ball of gold.Now this is the strange part:It was a ball of gold.Aye, by the heavens, it was a ball of gold.– passage 35 from The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895)Your heart, my friend, is the size of a stadium. If you try to fill it with small things – a new car, a vacation, a promotion at work, a bigger home, a stock portfolio – a mournful echo will fill your life. But if you fill your stadium with all of humanity and search for ways to make their lives better each day, you will find yourself in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing in the right way. Serendipity will come to stay.Do you have a purpose outside yourself?Are you climbing for a ball of gold?Roy H. Williams

When your business category is dominated by a single brand and all the other brands put together don't equal them, it's time to create a counter-brand.Counter-branding – business judo – is rare and dangerous. But when you're overwhelmingly dominated, what have you got to lose?Prior to the creation of their “Uncola” counter-brand in 1967, 7-Up had survived for 38 years as a lemon-lime soft drink with the slogan, “You Like It. It Likes You.”Yippee Skippy call the press, a soft drink likes me.As in Judo, the secret of counter-branding is to use the weight and momentum of your opponent to your own advantage. In other words, hook your trailer to their truck and let them pull you along in their wake.The steps in counter-branding are these:1. List the attributes of the master brand. In the case of 7-Up, the master brand was “Cola: sweet, rich, brown.” Everything else was either a fruit flavor or root beer and all of those put together were relatively insignificant. “Cola” overwhelming dominated the mental category “soft drinks.”2. Create a brand with precisely the opposite attributes. To accomplish this, 7-Up lost their lemon-lime description and became “The Uncola: tart, crisp, clear.”3. Without using the brand name of your competitor, refer to yourself as the direct opposite of the master brand. 7-Up didn't become UnCoke or UnPepsi as that would have been illegal, a violation of the Lanham Act. But when you're up against an overwhelming competitor, you don't need to name them. Everyone knows who they are.Let's look at a current example: Starbucks. Notice how I didn't have to name the category? All I had to say was “Starbucks” and you knew we were talking about coffee. That's category dominance.In the February 2005 issue of QSR magazine, Marilyn Odesser-Torpey writes about Coffee Wars, opening with the question, “Starbucks will certainly remain top dog among coffee purveyors, but who is next in line?” A little later we read, “Many of the competitors in the coffee segment are Starbucks look-alikes; if you take the store's signage down, it would be hard to tell the difference.”Traditional wisdom tells us to (1.) study the leader, (2.) figure out what they're doing right, (3.) try to beat them at their own game. This strategy can actually work when the leader hasn't yet progressed beyond the formative stages, but when overwhelming dominance has been achieved, as is currently the case with Starbucks, such mimicry is the recipe for disaster. Are all competitive coffee houses forever doomed to occupy the sad “me-too” position in the shadow of mighty Starbucks? Yes, until one of them launches a counter-brand.To determine what a Starbucks counter-brand would look like, we must first break Starbucks down into its basic brand elements:1. Atmosphere: quiet and serene, a retreat, a vacation, like visiting the library. Bring your laptop and stay awhile. They've got wi-fi.2. Color Scheme: muted, romantic colors. Every tone has black added.3. Auditory Signature: music of the rainforest, soft and melodious4. Lighting: subdued and shadowy, perfect for candles or a fireplace.5. Pace: slow and relaxed. This is going to take awhile, but that's part of why you're here.6. Names: distinctly foreign and sophisticated. Sizes include 'Grande' and 'Venti.' (No matter how you pronounce these, the 'barista' will correct you. It's part of the whole Starbucks wine-bar-without-the-alcohol experience.)Counter-brands succeed by becoming the Yin to the master brand's Yang, the North to their South, the equal-but-opposite 'other' that neatly occupies the empty spot that had previously been in the customer's mind.Here's what a Starbuck's counter-brand would look like:1. Atmosphere: energetic and enthusiastic. Running shoes instead of bedroom slippers. Leave the car running because we won't be here long.2. Color Scheme: bright, primary colors such as are found in athletic uniforms, against a background of white or off-white.3. Auditory Signature: anything with a driving beat, faster than a resting heart-rate. Dance music.4. Lighting: dazzling, like in a sports arena.5. Pace: driven by the music, on the move. Caffeine!!!6. Names: straightforward and plain. Descriptive, rather than pretentious.HOW IT MIGHT SOUND ON THE RADIO: Most people think to get a fast cup of coffee you have to settle for fast-food coffee …or worse…convenience store coffee. And to get a good cup of coffee you have to stand in line for 20 minutes at some snooty coffeehouse where things can't just be medium and large, but have to be 'Grande' and 'Venti.' At JoToGo we serve really good coffee, really fast. We're the original drive-thru espresso bar serving all your favorite premium coffee drinks at lightning speed. So when you're on the go, get a JoToGo. No snooty attitude here, just fabulous coffee fast.No matter how big a br

People have said for decades, “Word-of-mouth is the best kind of advertising. That's the best kind: word-of-mouth.” You hear this so often when you sell advertising that my friend Bob Lepine used to joke about opening The Word of Mouth Advertising Agency. He said he was going to hire people to sit at bus stops and ride the elevators in tall buildings and say to people, “Have you tried that new restaurant over on Fifth Street? It's GREAT!” The funniest part of Bob's idea is that it probably would've actually worked.The power of the buzz – word-of-mouth advertising – lies in its credibility. But the only way to create buzz is to rock a person's world so hard that they can't help but talk about it to their friends.I'm going to try to do that today.Ray Bard of Bard Press, the publisher of my bestselling Wizard of Ads trilogy, looked at the new hardback book about to be released by Wizard Academy Press and wrote me an email. (I was walking out the door to meet Ray for lunch when a boxful of advance copies arrived from the printer. On impulse, I grabbed one for Ray.) These comments by email were completely unsolicited:RoyGreat to see you and catch up yesterday. And, thanks for the new Wizard Academy Press book. I usually refrain from providing comments about books after they're published (I've made enough mistakes myself over the years) but there is one issue that may deserve attention.When I got home last night I gave the book a quick look. It felt good in the hand and the inside contents looked good. Although the title sounded like a political book and provided no information about the content, I know that it can get by as it is. The other, more difficult issue, is the price. When I first saw the $13.95 I thought it was a mistake but noticed it was printed in two places. The last time 300 page hard cover business books sold for $13.95 was probably 30 years ago. The retail price is a statement of what you think the value of the book is. When most similar business books are selling for twice as much today, you can see the message this sends.If the publisher is pursing a strong merchandising strategy with lots of face out retail space I recommend pushing the retail into the “value” category. Unless you have a new distribution effort, I would not recommend it for this book. And, the $13.95 is way beyond “value” pricing.For what my opinion is worth, I would have priced it at $30. and sold it at $20 for special customers. I think you can see the difference in psychology.Again, I regret bringing this up now, but I know the book will be used in the company's marketing efforts. And, as it is, the price sends just the opposite message you want.RayRay Bard is America's most successful publisher of business books. He is responsible for putting two of my books on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list and one on the New York Times list, so I listen carefully to what Ray says.He's right. Thirteen ninety-five is way too cheap for a 314 page hardback containing this kind of detailed information about how to make online marketing actually work. These pages are chock full of little-known techniques for improving online marketing results. More than a dozen Fortune 500 companies have paid the authors huge amounts of money to learn this stuff. That's why our plan all along was to price the second printing at 25.95. But this first printing exists only to create a buzz. That's why we're giving you 2 additional copies for each one you buy at just $13.95. We know you'll give them to friends. We know your friends will be rocked. We know your friends will talk about it to their friends. It's all about the buzz and this book contains some fabulous honey. By the way, shipping is free if you live in the US, so you'll have a grand total of only 4.65 per book in each of your 3 hardback copies.Wizard Academy Press is gambling that the information contained in this book will give you a heady buzz and be worth mentioning to your friends.I'll let you know in a few weeks how the experiment turns out. In the meantime, why not get 3 copies headed your way?Roy H. Williams

Standing inside Chapel Dulcinea recently, I looked up to see the great ribs beneath the roof beams above me and thought, “Jonah in the belly of the whale.” Do you remember the story? It's only four short chapters, a 5-minute read. The next morning, Princess Pennie went back to Dulcinea with me and we sat together while I read the book of Jonah aloud. Somehow, it felt like the right thing to do.Let me summarize it for you: Running from God, Jonah boards a ship headed in the opposite direction from the place he knew he was supposed to go. (Have you ever rebelled, brazenly, from what was expected of you by someone else?) And then a storm came. (Somehow they always do.) Thrown overboard, Jonah is swallowed by “a great fish” in whose belly he reevaluates his priorities and finds his soul again. Jonah's time of reflection and prayer in the belly of the beast is a marvelous thing to read. The fish then vomits Jonah unceremoniously onto the beach. (Ever been unceremoniously barfed by circumstances following a storm that hugely kicked your ass? Me too.) Now this is where the story gets interesting to me: Jonah, having survived the crisis, finally does what he should, but with a really bad attitude. The tale ends with Jonah being unbelievably petty and small, a pale shadow of the giant he had been during his time in the belly of the beast.Evidently, I'm not the only person who can go from high thoughts to low thoughts in a very short period of time. And neither are you.Interestingly, Jonah's pendulum swing was the inverse of Elijah's. Whereas Jonah went from high thoughts in the belly of the beast to low thoughts during his mission, Elijah went from high thoughts during his mission on the top of Mount Carmel (where he called down fire from heaven to burn up an offering to God in front of a huge crowd of witnesses,) to low thoughts immediately after his triumph. “Elijah was afraid and ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself went a day's journey into the desert. He came to a broom tree, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. 'I have had enough, LORD ,' he said. 'Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.' Then he lay down under the tree and fell asleep.” When Elijah awakened, he went to spend some time in a cave at Mount Horeb. Read the 19th chapter of 1st Kings and you'll recognize another belly, another whale.Every caterpillar must go into the cocoon if she will spread her newfound wings.Some will find Chapel Dulcinea to be the belly of the whale, a place for reflection in times of crisis. Others will find Dulcinea to be the cave at Horeb, a place to regain their balance after riding an emotional rollercoaster. For thousands of young couples, Dulcinea will be the cocoon from which will emerge the two-winged butterfly of marriage. But always it will be a place of transformative change.No one but Pennie knew that I was contemplating the book of Jonah and the value of reflection, so it came as a soft surprise when Bryan Eisenberg forwarded to me a quote he thought I might find interesting: “The Internet radically redefines a person's psychological relationship to time and space. Attention is riveted on what is tangible, useful, instantly available; the stimulus for deeper thought and reflection may be lacking. Yet human beings have a vital need for time and inner quiet to ponder and examine life and its mysteries… Understanding and wisdom are the fruit of a contemplative eye upon the world, and do not come from a mere accumulation of facts, no matter how interesting.” – Pope John Paul II, Sunday, May 12, 2002I hope you don't mind that I chose to share with you something less tangible and instantly useful this week.Come see us.Roy H. Williams

Hi Roy,Thanks for the mention in the MMM today. It never ceases to amaze me the buzz something like that creates.Reading it also reminds me of the other conversation that took place at the same time, when you and Dave were talking about how a chef reduces the sauce to intensify the flavour and how that process can be related to writing. That conversation adds clarity to today's argument raging in the US about 60's vs. 30's.CheersSteveThe “other conversation” mentioned in this email from my partner Steve Rae was with Dave Martin, the Academy graduate and friend in whose restaurant we were dining. Following my discussion of paint with Bob Shrubsall, Dave and I began discussing how impact grows when it's concentrated into less of the carrier vehicle. This is the secret of perfume, reduction sauce, and the edge of an axe. But just as sharpening an axe or simmering the water from sauce takes time and patience, editing words from descriptions is not a task for the anxious or twitchy.Easy reading is damned hard writing.Think of this principle as The Law of Refined Essence.I've always been a fan of David Ogilvy and J. Peterman, two of the great masters of evocative description, and both were advocates of long and colorful copy. These men were legends in their day but I believe that day is fading. The rules of communication are shifting beneath our feet.Haven't you noticed?We're entering an era of stimuli bombardment, visual ecstasy, sound bites, the micro attention span. A committed reader is a rare bird.Over-communication has accelerated beyond critical mass and the resulting explosion has fragmented the public mind.So the new rule is to say what you've got to say. And say it hot.Speaking to authors, Elizabeth Spencer said, “Don't overwrite description in a story – you haven't got time.” I believe her advice rings truer today than ever.What do you believe?Roy H. Williams

People who try to stay “on the cutting edge” tend to see everything as new. But the thing that has been will be again. And that which currently is, has been, long before our time.If this observation seems familiar to you, it's probably because you remember it from a book written a few thousand years ago. Solomon went looking for the meaning of life and the essay he wrote about his journey, Ecclesiastes, opens with a similar observation about the cyclical nature of things.I call such observations Laws of the Universe and I depend on them to make my clients rich. Sounds like a book title, doesn't it? The Wizard's Laws of the Universe? Perhaps I'll write it someday.Right now I'm looking at a business card I've been carrying in my wallet since late autumn, 2000; Pennie and I were in Stratford, Ontario, while the Bush-Gore “hanging chad” debate raged in Florida. No one was sure who had been elected president. So at dinner in the basement of Fellini's, my partner Steve Rae casually asked, “So what do you think will happen if your boy gets elected?”My reply was detached and instant. “We'll be at war within a year.”Stunned, the table went quiet until Dave Martin, our host, set down his fork and asked, “Why?”“Never put a Texan in the White House,” were the eight short words of my answer. Then, looking across the table at Bob Shrubsall, I said, “They tell me you know more about the science of paint than anyone I'll ever meet. Is that true?” Bob, in the understated way that is typical of Canadians, shared a little of his lifelong obsession with pigmentation and how it had led him into a specialized course of higher education that culminated in several college degrees and a career in research and development.“So what makes one paint different from another?” I asked.This question obviously energized Bob, so I pulled out a pen and began writing down what he said; “Paint, any paint,” he said, “is composed of only 4 things: pigment, vehicle, additives, and resin.”Funny thing. Advertising is like that, too.The pigment of an ad is its color, tone, temperament or style. It's what makes us recognize the ad as part of a specific campaign. Think of this “ad pigment” as brand essence. Most ads today are evocatively pale due to a lack of pigment.The vehicle of an ad is the media which delivers it; newspaper, television, radio, outdoor, direct mail, internet, yellow pages and word-of-mouth are all vehicles of message delivery.The additives of advertising are the specific message points it hopes to deliver.The resin of an ad is what makes it stick in your mind. Surprising Broca and adding a Third Gravitating Body are just two methods of adding stickiness. Ultimately though, your ad's resin is the salience of the message as measured by the central executive of Working Memory in the dorsolateral prefrontal association area of the brain's left hemisphere.Yes, there are laws of the universe. And one of them is that lots of things are like paint. Advertising is like paint. Reputations are like paint. It pays to understand paint.Half the people reading this memo were likely irritated by the hyper-generalized nature of the 8-word statement I made at dinner in the basement of Fellini's. “It's more complicated than that, dammit! To say 'never put a Texan in the White House' is just shallow and simplistic and childish and irresponsible.”Yeah, you're probably right.But we did invade Afghanistan 10 months later.Roy H. Williams

A few years ago, your customer could compare you only to your competitor down the street. But information gathering and comparison shopping have since become effortless, thanks to the internet. Tens of millions of us are gathering and comparing info 24/7 in the comfort and seclusion of our own homes.But we're not “your customer,” right?I recently spoke to an audience of 1600 businesspeople at a conference in Las Vegas. Just before I walked onstage into the spotlight, my host whispered into my ear, “It would probably be better if you didn't make any references to the internet, because this audience is almost exclusively 55 and older.” I smiled and nodded at him just as the man at the microphone said “Roy H. Williams” and I walked out from behind the curtain to meet my fate.Taking center stage, I raised my hand and asked, “How many of you have used a search engine in the last 7 days to research a purchase that you were considering?” At least 90 percent of the hands in the room were instantly raised. I looked offstage and shot a smile to my host who was staring bug-eyed at the ocean of fingers.But I suppose none of those people were “your customer,” either.To get in step with the times, you must begin seeing the internet as an information directory at your customer's fingertips, because I can assure you that's how your customer sees it.But unlike yesterday's yellow pages, this new information directory is consumer reactive, offering sights and sounds and detailed information. “To heck with letting your fingers do the walking. Let your fingers trigger the adventure.” Today's new directory can deliver streaming video of your best salesperson making his best presentation on his best day, directly into your customer's home. It can answer all your customer's questions and calm their unspoken fears. But no salesman is going to schedule an appointment with you to make sure you're “in the book.” This is a call you have to initiate on your own.The times, they are a'changing.Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's enough to tell your customer, “Call or come into the store before closing time and our friendly staff will be happy to answer all your questions.” Yes, perhaps “your customer” has lots of free time and nothing better to do with it. Perhaps things aren't changing at all. Perhaps the old methods of marketing will always work.But then I am reminded of C.S. Lewis, who said: “The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”Yeah. That's it. Just keep on doing what you've always done. I'm sure it will all work out.Roy H. Williams

NOTICE: This memo ends with a link to an ad writing course description. So don't be surprised.The last line in most TV or radio ads is usually a “call to action,” right? Especially if the ad was produced locally:“Hurry. These prices won't last long.”“Act Now. Offer expires soon.”“You must be present to win.”We say these things because we're trying to create a sense of urgency. We want to see customers respond immediately, so we yank the chain of self-interest. But the public is growing tired of having its chain yanked. And for this reason, ads that attempt to create a sense of urgency are becoming passé. We're developing an immunity to ad-speak.From the Great Depression through WWII, any product with the courage to advertise relentlessly was assured a place in the national consciousness. Mass media was cheap and all of America could easily be reached by it. You had three TV networks, a local newspaper and a small group of AM radio stations. Take your pick.Then we tumbled into the 60s and advertising got creative. Along came the 70s, FM radio arrived and right behind it, cable TV.Babies born in 1980 emerged into a plastic world of flashing lights and shallow hype. Cartoons like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were interrupted by ads for the Popeil Pocket Fisherman and the amazing Veg-O-matic. “It makes mounds and mounds of julienne fries! But wait! There's more!” Disco music and line dancing and riding the mechanical bull. Pop like a flashcube, baby. Then in 1983, Michael Jackson swept the Grammies and Madonna leapt onto the charts with Material Girl. “We are liv-ing in a material world. And I am a material girl.”Fast forward a quarter century: Never has a generation had so much to do and so little time. We're drowning in recreational opportunities. The Saturday morning cartoons of childhood blossomed into their own round-the-clock cartoon network and the nightly news has become a series of non-stop news channels. Comedy has its own unending comedy channel, movies their own 24-hour movie channel and department stores have morphed into a theme park of superstores known as Power Centers where we can watch the retail giants slug it out for our discretionary dollar: Circuit City vs. Best Buy. Linens'n'Things vs. Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Lowe's vs. Home Depot, OfficeMax vs. Office Depot, and PetsMart vs. Petco.What is a citizen to do?Those jaded infants of 1980 are turning 25 this year and they bring with them a new sensibility: Use technology to block out a too-much world.1. Digital Video Recorders allow us to skip TV commercials.2. Satellite radio and iPods allow us to hide from radio ads.3. Video games allow us to run from reality as we withdraw into an online world unreachable by modern advertising.MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) like EverQuest and WarCraft are a movie that never ends. The reality hook is that you are connected with other people who know you only as you have chosen to be known. Think of it as the ultimate costume party.Did you know that you can type a text message on the keys of your cell phone that will instantly appear on the cell phone of a friend? This “instant messaging” is slow and laborious, but millions do it as a way of showing courtesy to their friends. “Ring the phone when your message can't wait, send a text when it can.” Non-interruption is a high value among the emerging generation and they're beginning to spread an appreciation of it to their Baby Boomer parents as well.Bottom line: Our growing immunity to ad-speak means that the believability of ads that attempt to trigger urgency must be linked to the credibility of your desperation. So how do you think these “Hurry! Hurry!” lines are going to work in the future?“Prices so low we can't say them on the air!”“We won't be undersold!”“Be one of the first 200 people through the door and receive a free gift!”The marketplace is changing far more quickly than is advertising.That's why I'm here; to help you get in step with today's consumers. Do it and move ahead of the curve to where the sky is bright and the air is sweet.Let me know if you're interested.Roy H. WilliamsAuthor of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestselling Wizard of Ads trilogy

I wrote three memos to you this week, but decided not to send the first two. The first one, We Are Sancho Panza, is the dancing safari into symbolic thought that I promised you in last week's memo. It begins, “Who can explain our four-century attraction to Don Quixote? The book is hard reading and dull, full of inconsistencies, and confusing. A little like the Bible. And yet Quixote is the second most widely-read book on earth; second only to… yes, the Bible.” Powerful and flexible symbolic thought includes all forms of metaphor, simile and corollary. Its function is to relate that which is not understood to that which is understood. Even as the Psalmist wrote in Psalm 42, “deep calleth unto deep…” symbolic language calls to the unconscious; deep waters to deeper still.I decided not to send you We Are Sancho Panza because it might have been misconstrued as a spiritual ambush. Some might even have called it religious. It definitely travels beyond the boundaries I impose on these Monday Morning Memos, so don't click that link unless you really want to go there. You have been warned.The second memo I wrote but chose not to send was some very specific advice about radio advertising called “How to Make a Fabulous :30 from the Average :60.” But I decided to save those seven simple steps to deliver at an event I'll be doing in Dallas in May as a gift to my friend, Eric Rhoads, in honor of his 50th birthday.So having written two memos to you and deciding to send neither, I wandered over to Academy Hall to peep in at a guest lecture in progress. There, on our mammoth projection screen, it read: “What would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?” An interesting question, it immediately triggered a deeper one: “What would you attempt if you knew nothing you did would ever work out?”The first question urges you to dream big. The second, to be truly committed.What is worth doing even if you can't succeed? Is there a mountain worth climbing even if there's no hope of ever reaching the top? Think about it. Standing on the top of the mountain is a moment, supposedly the moment “that makes it worth it all.” Makes it worth all what? A lifetime of disconnection, alienation and misplaced priorities? The world's saddest person is that tragic has-been who speaks incessantly about his or her shining moment long ago. Do you really want to be the woman who “used to be” Miss America? Or the man who “used to play” professional sports?No mountain climber ever stays long on the summit. But the brevity of these visits isn't because someone drove them off to take their place. They leave because there is nothing more to do. The movie is over. The credits are rolling. Holding an empty popcorn bucket and a soft-drink cup, they go looking for a trash can and a bathroom.Susan Ertz once wrote, “Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” Life, if you will, is that rainy Sunday afternoon. What are you going to do with it?I'm talking about embracing a commitment to something far bigger than your own small and petty desires.Commitment is not to be found in brave talk, bold resolution, or dramatic gesture. And she will not be measured quickly. Strong and silent, Commitment steps into the light only in those dark and quiet moments when it would be easier to creep, unseen, away.How deep is your Commitment to what you're doing with your life? I ask only because I care.And it's never too late to change.Roy H. Williams